

:<fo^ 



CHIEFLY 

7*0777 





rLFir*Lrui 



y 



CASTLES IN 

SPAIN 



SOPHIA CHANDLER 







Glass 1 — -i- 

Book-.FtgC^ 



Copyright N ^ 






COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/chieflyfromcastlOObeam 



CHIEFLY FROM CASTLES 

IN SPAIN 



CHIEFLY FROM 
CASTLES IN 



BY 

SOPHIA CHANDLER 
E 1 1 a . I - 

ILLUSTRATED BY 

H. E. NELSON 



NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON 

THE NEALE PUBLISHING CO. 

1905 




LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

DEC 20 1905 



Copyright Entry 
CLASS ex. XXc, No 



ft 

No, 

H 






i_>— 



COPYRIGHT, J 905 
BY THE NEALE PUBLISHING CO. 



"Chiefly from Castles in Spain" is respect- 
fully dedicated to all the sometime tenants of 
those "baseless fabrics /' 



CONTENTS 



Chiefly prom Castles in Spain Page 

Part I 9 

Part II 39 

Part II (Continued) 75 

Tow Spinnings 

R. F. D 95 

Fragments of a Letter 103 

Letter from a Horn-book Dame 113 

Fragments of a Letter 125 

Tow Spinnings 

Commercialism Among Students 131 

Down in the World, Feather-weight 
Goods 
By a Creeper 139 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Facing Page 
"Her Face was Square Built and Pale 

and Seemed to Radiate Purity" 20 

"On the First Landing Stood a Tall 

Clock" 48 

"Brawn and Brain were in Her Well 

Balanced 58 

"A Letter was Tendered The Pleasant" 80 



CHIEFLY FROM CASTLES 
IN SPAIN 

Part I 



CHIEFLY FROM CASTLES 

IN SPAIN 

PART FIRST. 

I was the only child in our numerous 
household. We were laboring people. By 
chance some papers fell into my hands, 
which enabled me to trace our line of the 
family through several generations. At 
every halting-place on this dimly-lighted, 
retrograde journey I grew more thankful 
that such lines as : 

"The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
The man's the gold for a' that;" 
and 

"'Tis only noble to be good, 
Kind hearts are more than coronets, 
And simple faith than Norman blood." 

are so well-fathered as to vouchsafe for 
them not only immortality but a popular 
acceptance of the sentiment they embody. 



12 Chiefly from 

The manuscript stopped short of our 
origin, but I should have naturally infer- 
red that we were plebeian to the very root 
had it not come to my knowledge in an 
indirect way, that at least one branch of 
the common stock was gentle. This in- 
formation, containing no details, served 
only to color my fancies, and the question 
— were they "born great," or did they 
"achieve greatness?" though often in my 
mind, never passed from idle speculation 
to research. 

Never robust I passed my childhood for 
the most part in the company of my eld- 
ers. That is, I apparently sat among 
them or journeyed out and in by their 
side. But in reality I was oftenest either 
a happy inmate of one of my several cha- 
teaux en Espagne or making a royal pro- 
gress to that particular airy edifice that it 
suited my sovereign pleasure for the time 
being to occupy. I derived great comfort 
from the thought that I should not, 
were my life spared, always be a child. 
This came in part, I think, from my being 
ungainly in person. 



Castles in Spain 13 

I had fixed ideas of how I wished to ap- 
pear as a woman. My model was selected 
in the person of a cousin about ten years 

my senior It had been my 

happy privilege to pass several months at 
her house and I carried away many mem- 
ory pictures of this fair girl in her teens. 
Habited for a walk — her 
long veil of thin crape, with its deep bord- 
er of satin, such as was the mode for 
mourning in those days, for she had just 

lost her mother Sitting in 

the cottage porch of a calm, sunny day, I 
at her feet. Facing us across the road- 
way, rude steps cut in a precipitous rock 
led to a wild of summit. It was my de- 
light to climb this stair, feasting my eyes 
upon the wealth of fern and lichen, fancy- 
ing that the delicate sculpture of leaf and 
shell where the face of the stone was 
smooth might be the dainty cradle from 
which a frond or couch baby had just 
arisen, leaving its impress. 

To our left, up the slope was the great 
house of the landlord, whose jovial hospi- 
tality always thronged him with guests. 
Day was enlivened by their joyous laugh- 



14 Chiefly from 

ter as they came and went, and in the hol- 
iday attire of each dame and damsel it 
was plain that culture had a hand so 
harmoniously did the colors dwell togeth- 
er. Nightfall, even when starless, for- 
got to be sombre there, where from every 
window the lamp-light twinkled. At this 
side of the porch, in the hollow, was a 
fine grove and the dairy — hard by whose 
door into a natural basin, flowed ever, 
ever a stream of water gushing from the 
rock in the slope's side. 

To our right the gentle declivity led to 
the great stone mill. It pleased me to 
think its huge wheel some soft-hearted 
giant, smiling indulgently, humming 
monotonously, flinging his kind, clumsy 
arms grotesquely about, to divert the in- 
fant water-sprites who clung to him and 
vied in their efforts to smother him with 

caresses Beyond lay the 

peaceful landscape, with a neighbor's 
chimney here and there sending up its 
column of smoke. Near the mill the broad 
highway to the great city five miles dis- 
tant, crossed a railway — a grand trunk — 
running from a center and threading its 



Castles in Spain 15 

way through several States to reach an 
important seaport. And so its trains, 
almost momentary, were destined oft to 
carry from university to university the 
finished cosmopolite— who bears the same 
relation to the primitive earthling of rare 
outings, limited to the few miles of some 
obscure branch line, as does a score of 
Wagner to tunings of the harp of Jubal. 

My cousin was sewing and I watched 
with keen delight the flash of her needle, 
because the cotton stuff she held, of small 
but gayly-colored plaids, was being fash- 
ioned into a frock for me, having the skirt 
and baby sleeves garnished with tiny ruf- 
fles How is it possible, cir- 
cumscribed by mortal bodies — the "close 
furniture of words" sole means of ex- 
change for our ideas — truthfully to define? 
Builder of a lexicon, put off 
thy "sandaled shoon," for the ground thou 
treadest is holy. . . . Mayhap it is 
a love for The Beautiful, she to whom 
by acclaim we accord the reverence due 
an angel of light, whose "Joseph's coat" 
is hued like the saffron of the orient and 
the Occident, the clear azure of the zenith, 



16 Chiefly from 

the radiant Iris, sweet verdure, tropical 
birds, blossoms of the prairie; — whose 
gems were resurrected from God-fash- 
ioned caskets to flash upon her brow; 
whose rounded arms and taper fingers are 
decked with gold hoarded by the ever- 
lasting hills; whose name, as spelled by 
us, reads, Vanity ; upon whose head we set 
the cap, into whose hand we thrust the 

bauble, insignia of the fool 

. Parents, embalm in memory 
your own childhood's eyes, and use them, 
if you would read aright that score that 
God has set you to learn: your infant's 
heart. Away with "pathetic minors," 
those neutral tints of song! Let the 
music flash forth into sounds — fit echoes 
of earth's brightest melodies, audible re- 
flections of Nature's gayest tints. 

The flowering almond, scentless, while 
in bloom lacking foliage, guiltless of 
curve, a mere gaudy spike forming with 
the main stem an ensemble all angles, is 

my favorite. — . Why? Because 

my first child-bonnet, a gypsy of fancy 
straw, was adorned with a spray of this 
blossom. 



Castles in Spain 17 

For no reason but that like material 
went to make up a certain hat, and sun- 
dry "walking-coats" that my tender years 
doted upon, to this day, at sight of ruby 
velvet in conjunction with snowy plumes, 
of blue "alpaca," of cloth in bars of shad- 
ed red, my withered heart bursts into a 
verdure that bears some semblance to 
those "tender leaves of hope" which it 
"put forth" when, a pupil just enrolled, I 
took my first rapturous lesson from the 
delicious volume — Earth. 

At home, when I happened to be in a 
garb which I regarded with unusual com- 
placency, I used to flee the presence of a 
spinster neighbor who was in the habit 
of making us frequent calls. If unluckily 
she spied me it was evident that she 
thought an impressive tenue, coupled 
with a well-satisfied countenance, made a 
case which called for a homily. Thin lips 
and a croaking voice are usually relegated 
to the unmarried woman of uncertain age. 
Sometimes they miscarry. In Miss La- 
vina, however, these adjuncts were un- 
mistakable. In measured tones she re- 
cited : 



18 Chiefly from 

"How proud we are ; how fond to show 
Our clothes, and call them rich and new ; 
When the poor sheep and silk-worm wore 
That very clothing long before." 

.Youth in general is easily- 
wrought upon. I, as a brooder, furnished 
a field doubly inviting to a person with a 
mission. While the spell lasted— and in 
childhood minutes are multi-minutes — I 
was a pariah, "wrapped o'er" with the 
cast-off raiment of a creature, emblem of 
pusillanimity, or worse, — and here my 
ignorance in natural history took refuge in 
"glittering generalities." I was muffled 
in the slough of a crawlex - 

Returned from the sojourn with my cous- 
in, Thomasine, I ventured to express my 
ambition, nay, my fixed determination, to 
grow into her likeness. In vain they 
laughed me to scorn, explaining that in 
appearance, in temperament, she was all 
of her mother. We were related through 

the father Her hair was 

palest-gold, but it caught and threw back 
each ray of day-light or sunshine in such 
a persistent game of shuttlecock, that it 
became all aflame, like a thing with a 



Castles in Spain 19 

heart in it. It was loosely coiled, but for 
two long, heavy curls on either side of her 
face, which was square-built and pale and 
seemed to radiate purity. Her light grey 
eyes, the lids deep with sweeping lash, 
shed benediction. Her rather wide mouth 
which as she spoke or smiled revealed the 
square, firm teeth, methought was formed 
to repeat the, "I bless thee" so much of 
benignity was there in her countenance. 
My own moods took color from each 
hour's petty fortune, and I stood agape to 
see her ever moving in a spirit-atmos- 
phere of unbroken calm, insulated as it 
were from her life's rough weather. For 
her lot was not a favored one. She was, as 
I have said, motherless. The only daugh- 
ter, her three brothers, younger, not vic- 
ious, but full of a boyhood vigor that was 
apt to overflow in shout and clatter. The 
father, well-meaning and industrious, but 
one who seemed beset with the idea that 
the next place would insure his better- 
ment. And so almost annually he subject- 
ed his family to the annoyances incident 
to removals. 



20 Chiefly from 

I had but vague notions of how my 
transformation was to be effected, but it 
seemed to me that my child-costume once 
laid aside, a garb similar to hers, was to 
be the medium through which Protean 
power would reach me. It gradually 
dawned upon me with on-coming years, 
that no gown, however graceful its flow, 
no veil of any hue or texture, whether 
guiltless of satin-finish or garnished with 
a border prodigal of width, would ever 
reduce my spirit's varying weather to 
eternal calm, or sweep from my face its 
shifting register of hourly weal or woe, 
to chronicle there naught but submission 
in trial or a prescient moderation in felic- 
ity . 

You may be sure I had my dreams of the 
patrician line of Foy, and with unshaka- 
ble faith I set a maiden in the foreground 
whose every endowment, whether of spir- 
it or form, was furnished forth to a dot, 
and nothing in my airy atalier gave me 
more gratification in the construction. Of 
all my lessons in detail none were more 
assiduously conned than those dedicate 





Her face was square buih and pale and seemed to radiate purity 



FACING PAGE 20 



Castles in Spain 21 

to this kinswoman. ....... 

The year that I was fourteen was one of 
event in our village — Updown. It celebra- 
ted its one hundredth anniversary. Ap- 
propriate services were held in the church. 
From Grassland, a distant town and a 
place or some note, owing to its mineral 
springs, came by omnibus a gay party, in- 
cluding some younger members of fami- 
lies whose ancestors had been among the 
very first to settle at Updown. It was 
early autumn and so about the close of the 
season, but a few guests still lingered 
there, and these came also to attend our 
fete. 

Our church, upon a steep, was the first 
object seen upon approaching the village 
from any direction. It was square-built. 
On each of three sides was an arched en- 
trance with a folding-door of unpainted 
oak. The windows, deep from the great 
thickness of the walls, uncurtained, high, 
broad and small-paned, were also arched. 
The aisles were paved with brick. The 
pews of oak darkened by age, had sides 
so high that as a child, I used to wish for 



22 Chiefly from 

a Sunday eye in the top of my head, such 
as I had read fell to the lot of a certain 
inhabitant of Hafed's World of Chance. 
Galleries, supported by pillars and lighted 
by windows similar to those below, ran 
around three sides. On the fourth side 
was a commodious, in-railed space, with 
two gate-ways, and furnished with chairs 
for the fathers in Israel — of a form to fill 
with joy the soul of a latter-day lover of 
the antique. In this space a flight of steps 
led to the pulpit, which was fully ten feet 
up, a tub-like structure of paneled oak. 
On either side of the Bible-cushion was 
an arm of wood, to which was screwed, at 
least I used to hope it was so secured, a 
lard-burning lamp. The church was other- 
wise lighted for night service by candles 
set in sconces fastened against the pillars. 
The reader at the mid-week service- — 
announced for "airly candle-light" was 
often one Martin Kleipseidle, a layman. 
Into his prayer which followed the chapter 
he invariably brought the phrase: "This 
onfriendly world." Words without mean- 
ing to my childish perception, now aged, 
with 



Castles in Spain 23 



"The names I loved to hear, carved for many a year 
On a tomb." 



Thou speakest at last, O Martin, a lan- 
guage to me not altogether unintelligible. 
The invocation of another, always includ- 
ed a petition for "the lost sons of the Ad- 
amic race." . . . Who will gainsay 
me when I claim, to dub this last withal, 
the titles "vast" and "universal," afore- 
time the exclusive property of one Shakes- 
peare. . . . On a table near the offi- 
ciating person stood a candle-stick, its 
broad base serving as a tray for the 
snuffers. The reading of the chapter had 
numerous impressive breaks whilst these 
instruments were in action. The praise 
of both night and day service was also 
effectively punctuated by the "lineing" of 
the hymns: Two lines of each stanza 
were "given out," that is, read, then sung. 
Then two more, and so continued to the 
finish. 

The piece de resistance was an immense 
sounding-board, which, attached to the 
lofty vaulted ceiling by an iron rod and a 
stout chain, hung above the pulpit. It was 
bell-shaped, closed at the base, which was 



24 Chiefly from 

fully four feet In diameter, and painted in 
alternate stripes of white and yellow. 
From a pew I could see that object with 
my week-day eyes. That it was not solid 
never entered into my little head. I used 
to weigh its comparative merit as an in- 
strument of a torturous death, against 
the sword of Damocles. The single hair 
— as opposed to the rod and chain — was a 
potent pleader, and the balance wavered. 
But at last, the sounding-board being 
directly in evidence, it tipped the beam 
of doubt and gained the decision. That 
impending peril seemed sufficient for the 
rise of a new era in Christian martyrdom, 
and all who preached beneath its menace 
were henceforth glorified in my eyes. 

The afternoon of the Centenary was ideal. 
A beam of the declining sun stole through 
the church window and kissed in turn the 
age-sombred oaken pillars into a renewal 
of their youthful glow. At length it 
reached the one across from me and my 
eye followed it. Sharing the caress, as 
she stood beside the blushing shaft, was, 
I felt quite sure, my Foy "Lady Clara 



Castles in Spain 25 

Vere de Vere," my alter ego, as I some- 
times termed her— questioning if nobly 
born, 

"I should be I, or should I be 
One-tenth another, to nine-tenths me." 

. She looked sixteen. A line 
of forebears disciplined into noble carriage 
by a military life or the pleasures of the 
chase, had given her a form that bespoke 
her in archery Diana's peer. .... 
But let any woman of the masses say to 
Fashion: "I serve thee, and thee only," 
and this goddess will promptly, through 
her ministering spirit, the born modiste, 
endow her devotee with "style" and 
"presence" galore. The most rigid 
scrutiny might scarce detect the counter- 
feit. 

. . We all deprecate War. A thing 
sired of Evil, though sometimes made to 
serve a righteous cause. But the sum- 
mons to arms oft finds our youth guiding 
the plow, wielding the hoe and the pick, 
with an aspect — albeit oft without call — of 
slouch and defeat, that proclaims him no 
longer master but slave of the soil. The 



26 Chiefly from 

very sight of fellow-humans disciplined 
into superb carriage of shoulders and firm, 
rhythmic tread fires him into emulation. 
Each day of vigor and drill finds him 
more and more in physique that primeval 
creature he once was, whom his Maker 
bade "have dominion," not only to 
replenish the earth, but to "subdue" it. . 

The upper lip of Patricia— 

I subsequently learned her name — was 
wreathed in a fine scorn. Her mouth seem- 
ed formed to utter : "It pleases me to have 
— ." . . . My feature it was origi- 
nally, but generations of the phrase : — "It 
is expedient," had unstrung the bow, had 
set instead of the curve, thing of beauty, 
a straight line, rigid with accumulated 
conciliations, folded upon its nether part- 
ner in involutary resignation, forming a 
mouth from the corners of which the 
years plowed a furrow to either nostril, a 
fold wherein Resignation in duplicate now 
sits crowned, with a dual Ugliness for her 
prime-minister. . . . Her hands 
were gloved, but I well know what 
Nature is capable of in this direction. 
Sorry work she is sometimes forced to 



Castles in Spain 27 

make, with the mould marred by one an- 
cestor who had chewed his finger-nails, 
by another who, impatient of delay, had 
used his thumb as the tool nearest at hand, 
to press that down which refused to stay 
down, or force that up which — arch-slave 
of Gravitation— as persistently declined to 
rise. 'Till Beauty, who abides in the tip, 
was ousted by Utility, who has a weakness 
for elbow-room. 

. The fingers, long and slen- 
der, a legacy from Jubal, methought oft 
swept the harp-strings — a touch awaken- 
ing melody that Eolus might pause to 

catch The palm, tinted like 

the lip of a shell, was Diana's gift — reward 
of glowing health got from sweet air of 
wood and field. The whole, I ween, laid 
claim to gorgeous tapestry, as meed of 
many a well-plied task 

Her chapeau de paille was the 
form of that now relegated to the woman 
of the Salvation Army. The flare, which 
gave her face the appearance of being sur- 
mountel by a crescent, or a diadem if you 
please, was faced with mauve chiffon, and 
wide strings of the same material were 



28 Chiefly from 

tied in an ample bow under her chin. In 
deference to the on-coming autumn, the 
hat was decked with a rose which exactly 
matched in shade the corsage bouquet 
pinned against my white frock : A bunch 
of the Cardinal flower, then in the height 
of its bloom. The day previous I had ram- 
bled in opposite directions in order to pro- 
cure a sufficiency of this wherewithal for 
the adornment of my person. Her rose, 
if silken, was doubtless a Parisian crea- 
tion, and boxed for the voyage, its little 
life had been all of the stifled atmosphere 
of man-made town. If real, its usurping, 
monopolizing petals still bespoke it but of 
the World, born of mould, the manipula- 
tion of some skilful gardener, its environ- 
ment the formal parterre, almost as alien 
from the sweet, sweet Earth as if fashion- 
ed with scissors and needle. 

Now each group of my Cardinal flowers 
has an entailed estate in a God-planted 
garden distant the one from the other 
about a mile. Blossoms whose every breath 
is cadenced to the accompaniment of the 
rill at their feet, while a choir leans from 
latticed, leaf-laced balcony to assist in the 



Castles in Spain 29 

chorus. Earth's gala gown of green is 
now powdered with gold-dust, now dia- 
mond-sown. Today, for audience, the Sun 
smiles a broad encore. Yesterday the 
Clouds wept behind their veils for very 
ecstasy, till Earth, choir, flower were wash- 
ed with tears. At night— the chorus hush- 
ed — rill and flower e'en dream in numbers ; 
and at times, the god of daya-slumber,his 
spouse, in mantle of silver tissue steals 
out to hear, and Heaven's court is throng- 
ed with their progeny — tiny, bright-eyed 
listeners breathless to catch the tuneful 

murmur 

. Hair of a hue nowhere found 
but on the head of the heroine of romance 
or the canvas of old masters, such was 
Patricia's. But it was guiltless of the rip- 
ple with which the man of pen or pencil 
delights to endow it. Arranged Madon- 
na-style, it concealed a part of the ear, and 
I knew from its heavy sweep, that it 
crowned her with a glorious coil. 
Her gown was of that diaphanous, woolen 
material, then known as "Balzerine," 
woven with a satin cord en bayadere. It 
was mauve in hue, but the alternate bands 



30 Chiefly from 

of gloss and dull, as each reflected or ab- 
sorbed the light, gave it the glorified, va- 
rying shades of bud and blow, found in a 
field of blossoming clover. The cunning 
little elbow-sleeves, daintily ruffled, 
scarce reached the edge of her long gloves. 
Thanks to the then prevailing style, our 
lexicons as yet knew not the word 
"choker," and the white beauty-built 
tower of her neck was untrammeled, re- 
vealing those two tiny depressions at its 
base, where each clavicle joins the ster- 
num. Methinks here the artisan rested a 
finger-tip as she paused for a moment at 
her task. The stuff, save for a zone of 
satin, fell unbroken to her feet in folds, 
the rich fruitage of those mysterious, Ely- 
sian fields midway between frowze and 
scant, where none but the artist and the 
born modiste dare gleam 

Our most enterprising, entertaining, 
but withal, wholly reliable news-monger 
was Callie — Mistress Callie, strange to 
say. But she was childless, and nearly ten 
years her husband's senior. This differ- 
ence in age was emphasized by the fact 



Castles in Spain 31 

that Moses had a boyish face. To the day 
of his death, at nigh eighty, although 
sound of mind, his blue eyes had the wist- 
ful, far-off-gaze and placid smile of an in- 
fant. Hard by the door of their log dwell- 
ing was a purer charm than the love of 
gossip to draw me thither: A well that 
was a municipal pride. A certain "oaken 
bucket," you know, is immortal. Located 
by tradition, it "hangs in the well," and I 
never doubted but that Moses and Callie 
as custodians, dispensed the "emblem of 
truth overflowing" from this indentical 

moss-covered treasure 

An excellent authority represents Mrs. 
Bucket as always "washing greens," so I 
may venture to say that Callie, simultane- 
ously with her occupation of news-vender, 
alternated peeling "berdaders" with shap- 
ing short-cake dough. She had, however, 
her moments of complete repose — seated 
gazing into the street, motionless, speech- 
less, save for an occasional reluctant 
though kindly monosyllable. The only 
room had both a northern and a southern 
outlook. I always associated Callie's rest- 
ful atmosphere with her choice of the 



32 Chiefly from 

north window to sit by. Thus she could 
enjoy the aspect of sunshine— a fellow 
fair to look upon — while keeping him at a 
respectful distance as one who, when 
skies are fair, is prone to become imper- 
tinent in his neighborliness. Added to 
this, he has oft been known to break his 
word, and he utterly forsakes you in the 
day of adversity. North Light, on the 
contrary, is propriety itself, and while he 
holds out no glittering promises, in fair 
weather as in foul he ever doles you of 

his best. 

Moses' tin-shop, which was also the 
sleeping-apartment, was reached only 
through the living-room. The bedstead, 
regardless of temperature, was ever piled 
high with mattresses of down. Entirely 
around its base was drawn a full- gather- 
ed, gaudily-flowered curtain, and in the 
space enclosed was stored in season, the 
winter supply of pumpkins. Callie wore 
a cap of black net, and parted above her 
forehead was a false "front" of bright red 
hair, which was apt to appear unkempt. 
Her nose, abnormally long, was disfigured 
by a wart. I write of these defects from 



Castles in Spain 33 

hearsay. What I saw in her face was the 
ever-kindly gleam of her small, half-shut 
eyes. What I read there was : "With me 
abides good cheer, and my hospitality, 
like my well, fails never." 

She was tall and spare, but it was plain 
that she considered breadth a necessary 
component of an effective tenue. On 
gala occasions she wore several skirts full- 
gathered and habitually walked with her 
arms akimbo. A green veil, broad and 
long, the end of its "draw-strings" tied 
under her chin, was folded across her bon- 
net, which was of a straw known as Leg- 
horn. In form similar to those worn by 
the Shakers, it had a frill of not more than 
two inches. Her "best" for a number of 
years, it gave promise of a service in the 
same capacity for as many more, as each 
season it was "done-up," bleached, stiff- 
ened to bucram, stretched v/hile damp 
over a wooden form, ironed to an irre- 
proachable gloss, and re-ornamented with 
frill and bows of yellow ribbon. Gowned 
in a fabric of broad, many-colored plaids, 
and walking with her toes turned in, she 



34 Chiefly from 

looked some self-satisfied fowl of bright 
plumage. 

Sharing the spirit of its mistress, the fire- 
place was so ample as to leave but a fourth 
of the room's width on either side, and 
the mantel-shelf was fully eight feet up. 
At meals, a circle of saucers, each con- 
taining a different "spread," had the but- 
ter-plate for a center. The stewed fruit 
might be furnished with a spoon for 
helping, but the syrup, the honey, the jam 
and the marmalade were not so honored. 
Each person was expected to "reach to" 
with his individual knife. A dip, a dex- 
terous twist to save the drip, usually 
secured what might suffice to cover a 
single "bite" of your slice of bread. As 
yet, "germs" were not. Did you go to 
table a foe to sweets, Callie's shake of the 
head and murmur of "umh-hoo-umh-hoo 
this momlet is certainly delightful," over 
some recent concoction of fruit and brown 
sugar, was sure to beguile you into a trial 
of your skill, with results that, if you were 
a tyro, the table-cloth but too faithfully 

cronicled I doted upon the 

coffee for the sake of the pot. It was 



Castles in Spain 35 

cylindrical, about fifteen inches in height, 
including the dome lid. The ground 
white, with landscape, flowering vines, 
and scroll work, all of a deep blue. . 

There were times when all that 
made life dear to Callie— her gossip, her 
short-cake, the afore-mentioned sweets, 
the laughing romp of the children let loose 
from the school house on the next lot, the 
gay sound of Moses' tin-hammering — was 
as gall, became her arch-enemy, and she 
lay, doctored by peppered vinegar, a vic- 
tim of sick headache. Owing to the en- 
forced fast, after such an attack she was 
always at her best. So I found her when 
I hied me thither one day soon after the 

anniversary 

. . . "—Patricia Foy- — Honore, that's 
who she is. A boarder at 'The Springs.' " 
— The colloquial name of Crossland. — "I 
guess she is some o' your quality kin, 
Helen Foy. When I saw your face across 
from her'n, I thought of that pictcher in 
the Whig paper after last 'lection day, of 
Henry readin' the returns."— -Henry was 
Mr. L— ■ — a defeated Democratic can- 
didate. " 'Twas pity to see the hand- 



36 Chiefly from 

somest man in all the country, sittin' 
there in the paper with no more looks 
than I or you." (I must here say that 
Gallic had no intention to inflict pain. 
Previous conversations had paved the way 
for free speech upon our respective claims 
to beauty.) "■ — And yet his wife cut the 
thing out to keep, for she said her best 
'guerreotype of Henry wasn't as good a 
likeness of him." .... Which 
colloquy, or monologue rather, for Gallic 
had the floor, in its hint of the perverted 
resemblance I bore to Patricia, goes to 
support v/hat I have already intimated, 
that some of us are born caricatures of 
ourselves. ......... 

Not upon the pages of inspiration alone, 
does God reveal Himself. Nothing but 
human disobedience of law, and the con- 
sequent necessity for the Divine-in-human 
fulfilment of the same, made this book. 
. . . . Time was when Man, not as 
yet self-banished, wept over, entreated to 
return, subjecting Deity incarnate to a 
like exile, and at last to ignominy and tor- 
ture, was fete under God's own roof tree — 



Castles in Spain 37 

held high discourse upon Nature's sweet 
open secrets, of star, of bird, of flower, 
with One whose lore is chronicled upon 
that page which stretches from eternity to 

eternity Then the Eternal 

Eye "looked love in eyes which spake 
again." . 

No less the Creator of material per- 
fection than of spiritual, why should God 
not joy in the corporate? .... 
. All consummation of utility 
that Fallacy has not way-laid and dis- 
crowned, made second-hand, is equally 
consummate beauty. ...... 

Who dare fend the Creator of Genius 
from a share in her deep joy when con- 
ception yields the rich fruitage of form? 
. A gladness that is but the 
faintest echo of that exultant "very good" 
which leaped to the lips of The Great 
Cause, " in the beginning." .... 

And think you not that his master- 
thought was husbanded against that won- 
drous moment wherein He said:— "Let 
us make man?" .... The crown 
of material creation was the human body, 



38 Chiefly from 

the one exponent of as yet inviolate law 
that was destined to be the shrine of 
God's image; the soul. Greek we well 
know that form was. . And 

man will come to his own again, "mens 
sana in corpore sano." When disciplined 
by ages in Time's great Training School, 
humanity as one, perfected in contrition, 
will submit its distorted code to the God- 
man, the Deity corporate. For redemption 
will rise re-crowned, immortal; will set 
the World, now "sweet bells jangled and 
out of tune," once more in harmony with 
that consequent of unbroken law; the 
sweet, sweet Earth "new made each 
morning," will "dress and keep," through 
all eternity, its ever primeval Edens. 



CHIEFLY FROM CASTLES 
IN SPAIN 

Part II 



CHIEFLY FROM CASTLES 
IN SPAIN 

PART SECOND. 

. "Fairly efficient," might be said 
of my immediate family, be their labors 
indoors or afield. In constitution a weak- 
ling, while the others were hardy, it was 
hoped that my lack of muscle might be 
atoned for by deftness. Alas, conscien- 
tious, painful effort, which meted me a 
scant reward when I wielded broom or 
hoe, spawned ten prankish imps — each 
empowered with absolute control of a 
separate finger — did I essay needle-work. 
So it was decreed that I must be sent to 
school, and the proceeds of many a stent 
were carefully set aside for that purpose. 
I much fear me that my subsequent career 
of under-teacher at the place where I 
received my education, would have also 



42 Chiefly from 

been sloughed in shameful defeat, had not 
desperation spurred me on. I foresaw 
that but one goal was possible : To obtain 
unlimited credit for that quality most 
sought for in a subordinate : "painstaking 
and trustworthy," and that even that, 
humble as it was, must be agonized for. 

Such prizes excite no envy. On the 
contrary, the golden crowned of "Lettered 
Ease" pressed by acclaim the leaden 
circlet about my brow, till each tache 

drew blood 

But in a past not very re- 
mote, when I was verging on middle age, 
and one by one that household of which 
I once had been the child-center laid 
aside mortality, 'till but that being was 
left who, in her zenith, we had called our 
pride — the last, the best-beloved. And 
she met with a frightful accident, which 
rendered her well-nigh helpless. . . . 
. Then love said: "Helen, I 
need thee. So long as this only heart that 
is near thine beats, thou must be my min- 
ister. For a space thou shalt experience 
that most exquisite of mortal delights: 
conscious power. I have long seen with 



Castles in Spain 43 

what passionate yearning thou hast wit- 
nessed its manifestations in the elect. 
Fear not. All thy shivering nakedness of 
inefficiency shall be clothed upon with 
that radiant garment which is ever a pal- 
ladium to the wearer." ...... 

. Reader, for four years, con- 
scious that the sufferer felt my arm a sure 
stay, seeing that her moods took color 
from mine, that cheerful sounds could at 
one time "down" the dull thud of her 
rarely-absent pain, that brightness, at 
another, compelled her mental gaze from 
the dusk of her woeful plight, my heart 
basked beneath a cloudless June sky. 
My eye, like a sun-kissed window, all 
aflame, radiated genial kindliness. Set on 
by love, good fairies held special session, 
for me, for me. 

In a trice appeared the Sixth Sense 
carrying gifts. Health took from her 
color-box the fairest rose to brush my 
cheek. Fleetness winged my foot. Nerve 
sent a brace for my arm. From Skill 
came her strictest instructor, Discipline, 
who soon opened school with ten pupils. 



44 Chiefly from 

. . . . What matters that when the 
spirit of my Shut-In was at last vested in 
immortality, the supernumerary whisked 
away with these trappings? .... 
For they too wear a semblance of the 
imperishable — stored under memory's 
roof-tree— and there are times when mere 
mortal vision but sees me as of old, my 
heart chilled under leaden skies, with 
shambling gait, going again my flinty 
way, life's work, done with "prentice 
hand" and bungling fingers, yielding me 
but one wan joy: the patronizing "well- 
meant" of a task-master that I am really 
pacing the roomy Past, once more clothed- 
upon with all the blessed insignia that ever 
proclaims: "She has had her day." . 

Eurith, a young kins-woman 
of mine, goes to college, and at my 
"Boarding School" reminiscences, is 
thrown into a state impossible to define, 
seeing that surprise is not to be found in 
the modern lexicon. As for myself, I still 
use my last century first issue of Webster, 
wherein the word is a red-letter one, in- 
terpreting for me sweet memories of the 
Santa Claus legend, and of sundry pie- 



Castles in Spain 45 

thoric Christmas stockings. I much fear 
me that the twentieth-century infant, 
guiltless of acquaintance with the one- 
time king of child-world, and on whose 
pathway is shed naught but the "light of 
common day," has no great advantage 
over Minerva, sprung into life crowned 
with adulthood. 

Panoplied in my out-of-date acquire- 
ments, I meet Eurith's counter-recitals, 
given in Greek for the most part, with a 
volley of adjectives, each bearing its note 
of exclamation 

Shadow Stream, the school chosen for 
me, was at no great distance, but I had 
never been in that direction. Going 
across country, I was the first of the lim- 
ited twenty to arrive, the others coming 
from a distance, arriving in the evening by 

the city stage coach 

. The dining-room, into which 
I was ushered, was spacious and lofty. 
The declining sun of early October 
streamed through two broad high win- 
dows. The carpet was blue-figured in a 
large pattern with salmon, and this last 



46 Chiefly from 

tint was repeated on the walls. A fire 
blazed in the "Franklin Stove," which was 
merely an iron out-lining, so to speak, of 
an open fire-place. There were two un- 
covered tables of walnut, the legs plain 
and clumsy, and braced at base by cross- 
pieces of like thickness. One, obviously 
for the twenty, was oblong and extended 
nearly the length of the room. The other, 
much smaller, was square. A girl in her 
teens sat there alone, winding scarlet 
wool off a small reel. She rose to receive 
me. Her presence seemed as a breath 
of spring-time woodland air. She was 
tall and lithe, with a fair face, rosy cheeks, 
red lips, glossy black hair, sparkling dark 
eyes, constant, piquant little bird-like 
movements. I named her Vivacity on 
the spot. Eut I found as she conducted 
me to my room, chatting all the while, and 
busying herself to serve, that she was 
Matilda, niece to one of "the ladies ;" that 
she lived "across the creek," had left off 
school, but now came for extra instruc- 
tion, two hours each day. 

The school-room was on the second 
floor. When I presently entered, the 



Castles in Spain 47 

hanging lamp was already burning. A 
wood-stove fire hummed a delicious little 
tune. Though no teacher was present, 
the nineteen were assembled, some at their 
desks, others occupying the class forms. 
I joined these last. An occasional remark 
was made, but in so low a tone as scarcely 
to disturb the stillness, which seemed not 
uncivil nor awkward, but restful. "Mighty 
pretty collar," ejaculated a Southern girl 
next me. And it was handsome. Fully 
five inches broad, including the deep 
points, then in style, of sheerest Swiss 
muslin, covered with rich embroidery. 
In this, as in plain sewing, the needle of 
our Pride wrought marvels. To me all 
were strange, and every face new, save 
one. Just across from me sat Patricia. 
She was registered— as I subsequently 
noticed— Patricia Honore, and addressed 
the letters to her friends, Fois-Honore. 
Thus spelled, the name suggested no con- 
nection with mine, and at school our 
relationship remained unknown. One 
day her uncle called, and she returned 
from the parlor bringing his request to 
see me. A man gray-haired, of suj 



48 Chiefly from 

physique and finished utterance, who 
scrutinized me, but kindly, and put me on 
more amicable terms with myself than I 
had ever been. Though the members of 
our household were personally unknown 
to him, I found he had been at the pains 
to acquaint himself with their individual 
excellencies. The kinship began to pose 
as a mutual honor. Patricia I adored. 
She took my homage as the inevitable 
sequence of her existence: "I am born, 
therefore I am worshipped." She was 
ever kind, most kind. Patronage, a thing 
base-born, was to her the impossible. 
She sometimes invited me to join her in 
her walks, and in vacations we even ex- 
changed occasional letters. And I — I 
was content. It is possible for a hero- 
worshipper to be in bonds that no more 
suggest intimacy than does the relation- 
ship existing between the altar and the 
aqenouilloir 

. . . The house, square-built, with 
a wide porch, stood on a gentle eminence, 
fronted by a spacious, tree-shaded lawn, 
with its semi-circular driveway from two 




I ; . 



On ihe first landing stood a tall clock 



ING PAGE 



Castles in Spain 49 

double-gate entrances. The boundary- 
was a well-kept hedge. Entering the 
great half-glazed, two-leafed door, one 
found a spacious hall, and a similar door 
at the opposite end, gave a view of a porch, 
a terraced slope, the barn and other 
out-buildings on the left. Beyond the 
slope, a bit of woods, a foot bridge cross- 
ing a meadow stream, and in the distance, 
Matilda's "across the creek" home : Brook 
Bend. A door to right and left near the 
main entrance, led respectively to the 
parlor and dining-room. Then wide, op- 
posite spaces filled with book shelves, well 
furnished, the glass doors protected by 
wire netting. Later I found one literary 
treasure there to be a Life of St. Louis, 
a folio in French, from the library of 
Queen Anne, bound in vellum and of sil- 
vered type. From mid-hall a passage led 
to "The Right Room." In an opposite 
passage was the stair-way and a door 
leading to the chapel. On the first land- 
ing stood a tall clock. The case, with 
richly-carved, battlemented headpiece of 
walnut, but so darkened and polished with 
age as to appear ebony. The dial, silvered, 



50 Chiefly from 

with hands and Roman hours of gilt, had 
painted across its top a landscape : In the 
foreground, a few trees, their naked 
branches shivering above the dull earth, 
patched here and there with snow. In 
perspective, bleak field and sombre wood- 
land. Above all, the moon, in tender cres- 
cent, bravely periling billows of angry 
cloud. 

Against this, the face of "the man in the 
moon" appeared: Now the right profile, 
a vale imprisoned Dante, his glance climb- 
ing to Beatrice on the plain. Then in full, 
rubicund, jolly. Again a side view, with 
look like Lucifer's "Downward Bent." 
Thus with pathetic irony did this ven- 
erable neighbor tabulate the phases of 
that chill, inconstant planet, upon which 
he alone possesses the adaptability to re- 
side 

The striking bell rang purest melody. 
"Day of stress, hush thy plaints; Night of 
weary watching, stifle thy moan;" it said. 
"Listen, while I sing to thee, that Time, 
with its varied day, is but an interlude of 
ever glad Eternity." 



Castles in Spain 51 

Near the clock was a single-paned, oval 
north window. From this I was to see 
for the first time, a comet. M eagerly 
clad, shivering, in the "wee, sma' " hours 
of a winter morning, I was in a frame to 
see it — a sword leapt from the scabbard of 
Mr. Tulkinghorn's menancing Roman. 
By its glitter I descried Lady Dedlock, 
beautiful, jeweled, regal, as "she sweeps 
up the stairs" and the printed bill on the 
wall: 

MURDER 
£ i o o 

REWARD 

"which she looks at going by." 

Strictly among ourselves 
the appellations the Six had got in baptism 
were sinecures. A clever girl in some 
term of misty date, had re-named five of 
them respectively : The Good, The Merry, 
The Kind, The Sweet, The Agreeable. 
These distinctions had become legendary. 
All were foreign born and five past middle 
age. Ignoring such details of their history 
as had become common stock, and which 
were at most but meagre, it pleased me to 



52 Chiefly from 

fix the nationality and previous career of 
each according to my fancy. 

The Good was from gay Paree. Her 
father had been of no religious belief, and 
her mother, an American of Puritan stock, 
if she did not share his ideas, was at least 
indifferent. Possessed of means, their 
dominant thought was the salon, wine, 
elegance, beauty, repartee. For five 
years this daughter was the center of such 
a circle. But by a chance course of read- 
ing she became serious. Not merely the 
good, doing her duty "in that state of life 
unto which it had pleased God to call" 
her, but the quasi-religieuse, the ascetic. 
. . . . Her whole exterior — -a face 
the form of the Empress Eugenie's, with 
the same appealing look, the same ele- 
gance in the curves of the small mouth and 
the nose, slightly aquiline, her slender 
figure, the delicate hand, the narrow, 
shapely foot, bespeaking the creature born 
for a summer day, to please, to be pleased, 
to flit, to sip, incapable of thought for 
the morrow, unfit alike to scale sub- 
limated heights or penetrate turbid 
depths — gave exemplification sublime of 



Castles in Spain 53 

the fact that real piety, fed from its own 
pellucid source, comes to its full stature 
a thing quite extraneous to the stock 
whereon it is grafted. 

The Principal— her will seemed law to 
her assistants. A teacher inspiring re- 
spect. No being endowed with a severe 
countenance, a Roman nose, and uncom- 
promising lips, could have rewarded more 
impartially or reproved with greater rigor. 
With hair broadly-filleted, in gowns of 
unvarying black and quaint outline, she 
seemed one apart. Our fete days were 
often her holy days. Absent from table, 
she was known to spend the hours fast- 
ing and in solitary devotion. 

The Merry's cognomen I repudiated, 
as belittling. But its substitute, The 
Satisfying, I held guarded from the gar- 
niture of speech, a sweet prisoner in my 

soul It appears then, that 

Patricia was not the subject of undivided 
honors. I was a devotee at more shrines 

than one. 

. This new goddess impressed 
me as does the word Greek, which with 
us has come to mean the primeval, the 



54 Chiefly from 

unperverted 

. . . . Coiffure en regie! hair like a 
thing with a heart in it, vibrant, coy, here 
meekly submissive to the discipline of the 
Psyche knot, there impetuously resisting 
its control, scandalizing the dignified tiara 
by letting loose a brood of tatterdemal- 
ion locks to run riot over its domains— 
this, she had perforce surrendered to now 
vanished Youth. Maturity deprecating the 
wicked theft of this scapegrace, revenged 
herself Coifed with the tur- 
ban, behold the Merry still a daughter of 

Art For this bit of her attire 

she was her own blanchisseuse. No 
laundry ever profaned it. Cleansed in the 
baignoire that served for her personal ab- 
lutions, it seemed a crown, built by the 
exquisite masonry of softly, silently de- 
scending snow-crystals, rhythmic-formed 

nurselings of the ether 

Clad ever in gowns of a texture neutral- 
tinted, fine, and soft, she mirrored a 
cloud-enfolded Grace. Over stockings 
slightly tinted, were worn black sandal 
slippers, each dual row of straps meeting 
atop the instep in tiny bows of ribbon. 



Castles in Spain 55 

Genial sunshine, tender mist, that un- 
pent, blowing "where it listeth," soul up- 
lifting air of the open — these duty mixed, 
formed color transcendent for her face. 
The lips, a curve of scarlet set in this paly 
fairness. The brow, after-touched, shone, 
and was veined about the temples with 
with azure. The eye's deep mantle thrill- 
ed the cheek into rose with the glancing 
touch of its silk-fringed border. 

In nothing did Pristine Creation so de- 
light to show her versatility as in fash- 
ioning the nose: (And nowhere, alas, is 
After-Production, Caricature, more rife, 
and more eager to mar the mould.) One's 
fancy, perforce coquette, flits uncertain 
amid types, pure and in combination of 
retrousse, Roman, Greek, but ever comes 
to fix itself upon this last. And of this 
last, like Lord Byron's, was my lady's. 

Her countenance was one of 
those that ground impregnably one's con- 
victions of personal immortality. It 
breathed: "With me is joy that I am, 
gladness in co-existence with Love, Light, 
Innocence, Virtue, Justice, Beauty, Sub- 
limity, Unmarred Continuity. As for all 



56 Chiefly from 

sin — Hate, Darkness, Shame, Unfairness, 
Cruelty; as for Deformity, Unsightliness, 
Suffering, Loss, Death, these are but ep- 
isodes of motley Time, which is, for the 
elect, a Training School, (wherein fineness 
becomes superfine, conscious, radiant, and 
dross consumes itself,) intersecting shore- 
less, transcendently, felicitous Eternity."* 
It goes without saying that 
she taught Deportment. She also had a 
class in Elocution, and was besides our 



*Note. — He who goeth "unto his own 
place," himself reared the walls as so 
many bulwarks against Divine Love, and 
of that Highway whereby it would have 
reached him, his own undoing hands made 
wreckage. So that now, there is naught 
but "a great gulf fixed" between him and 
the "Afar off." So that now, for him, 
of the great Fount of Living Waters only 
a mirage, one sparkling drop at Mercy's 
finger-tip, remains. 

— — — — — — Everlasting? 

— — — — — — One would 
fain couple with Eternity the presence 
of God. 



Castles in Spain 57 

almoner. While The Good prayed, The 
Merry wrought an answer. Certain hours 
each week, the twenty, under her guid- 
ance, became executive for the inefficient 
— hands for the maimed, vision for the 
sightless, stay for the suffering— in the 
making of clothing, and the concoction of 
sustaining dishes. Meanwhile, she read 
to us, the volume chosen — seeing the plod- 
ding nature of our occupation— being ever 
one whose mission it was to divert, to 
relax, to mark "red-letter" the passing 
hour. Were it a tale, each assumed a 
character — whose career she followed 
with breathless interest. Each possibly 
might be called upon to suffer vicariously, 
suspicion, or pity, or scorn, or worse; to 
hear, in the presence of the whole assem- 
bly, such a catalogue of virtues and of 
personal charms— hers pro tempore only 
— calculated to suggest comparisons, awk- 
ward, if not painful. 

A play of Shakespeare it was at times. 
And plainly the reader had got her cue 
from the first dramatist of the day. But 
it was in such selections from Burns as 
were deemed permissible to our tender 



58 Chiefly from 

years, that she put the best of herself, that 
she most stirred me. Clearly there was 
either in her some Scottish blood, joyously 
coursing to the measure of its native 
brogue, become sublimated by genius, 
made charming, incomparable, or— by 
association— these poems awoke a mem- 
ory of some hours, the gladdest, the ten- 
derest, of her life. 

The Kind — Matilda's aunt — was a Scot. 
Of powerful physique and quick percep- 
tion, brawn and brain were in her, well 
balanced. She was our point d'appui, 
the pivot upon which we turned as an in- 
stitution. All the cooking was under her 

direct supervision 

Now that a Peace Congress 
has been, and statistics prove that in spite 
of "wars and rumors of wars," Arbitration 
holds recognized claim of a Future not 
quite vague, it is with misgivings that 
one's spirit is stirred at the sight of a gen- 
eral marshaling his forces. But no com- 
punction follows when my eye kindles 
anew at the remembrance of chance 
glimpses of The Kind — her neat skirt half 
encircled by an apron its equal in length, 







1 



v/x 



" Brawn and brain were in her well-balanced 



FACING PAGE 58 



Castles in Spain 59 

sturdily trudging beside a wheel-barrow 
trundled by relays of stout "help," and 
freighted with bread ready for the baking. 
Our forefathers' fine scorn for step-saving 
and time-husbanding, which we secretly 
applaud but as resolutely oppose in the 
whole trend of our lives, was well exem- 
plified at Shadow Stream. The kitchen 
and oven fairly reveled in non-propin- 
quity, being separate the width of an ag- 
gravating, pebbly slope. The great loaves 
en voyage, bore eager testimony to the 
saving grace of the "little leaven." 

How the "lump," prone, inane, seeing 
in "to be" no great gain over "not to be ;" 
or, worse, being in motion, downward 
bent, seeking corruption, was by the "hid" 
transformed, grew big with noble purpose, 
and, the crucial fires of probation past, 
lived henceforth to nourish, to bless. 

But there were times when "bread 
alone," it left our table in untasted plate- 

fuls The term just begun, 

we homesick, disdaining renewed ac- 
quaintance with the tasks that vacation — ■ 
sharing Tom Tulliver's opinion of book- 
learning had obligingly forgot— then it 



60 Chiefly from 

was that we most moved the great heart 
of The Kind, whose eye-brows were 
habitually arched by a solicitous, Why? 
whose lips seemed ever shaping them- 
selves in a commiserating, Oh! 
Not with fruitless words did she essay to 
console. When "the tear was in her eye" 
Susannah found "the buckwheat cake was 
in her mouth" — a persuasive "don't you 
cry." 

Then the seed-cake was surreptitiously 
slipped into pockets damp from tear- 
charged handkerchiefs. Machiavelian 
must The Kind needs be in making this 
conveyance for The Good rigidly set her 
doll-face against all pampering. And this 
seed-cake, so I call it, was a good in itself, 
full-stuck with goodness in miniature, a 
sweet crowned, that the gods might share. 
To the Southern girl came solace in the 
form of corn-bread, the peer of that with 
which she was wont to be regaled by her 
dusky mammy. In obsequious attend- 
ance was maple syrup and clabber cheese 
in-sea-ed with cream. 

It must have been during a London fog 
that Disraeli, in Lothair, made somebody 



Castles in Spain 61 

say: "I live only for climate and the 
affections," and, "As for atmosphere, I 
look upon it as the main source of 
felicity." The character of the Portuguese 
you may depend was conceived in a fit of 
sheer desperation at the state of the 
weather. An ideal reaction, so to speak, 

of material unendurableness 

. This apropos of discussing 
The Sweet, whose aspect breathed, to the 
accompaniment of our clime's fickle winds, 
a poem, its burden one of those shores 
that we are born and reared to look upon 
as blest of heaven and accursed of man, 
whether Italy, or Southern France, or 
Spain, or Portugal, I know not. 

She was diminutive, small-featured, 
dark. Shod ever with felt her step was 
noiseless. When I add, gliding, it is with 
no intention of being melo-dramatic, but 
merely to signify the gait of an Oriental. 
Shuffling would be the word, but I have a 
weakness, shared by the world at large, 
for euphony, and besides, to an ear strictly 
orthodox, the term in question is sugges- 
tive of ambiguity if not downright un- 
godliness. I am afraid I shall be accused 



62 Chiefly from 

o£ plagiarism from some tender romance 
when I say that her face prompted the 
thought that she was the dream of some 
old master stepped out of its canvas. 
But armed with conscious integrity, I go 
unblushingly on. 

Her hair, worn Madonna style, was 
dusky and crepe. Her eye, not prominent, 
a velvety black. Habitually propitiatory, 
it implored as if to avert impending dan- 
ger. A look, some say characteristic of 
those who are to die by violence. This 
lady serenely closed a life, long and un- 
eventful, in her bed and surrounded by 

friends Monologue fairly 

bristles with opportunity for exaggeration. 
Its employer's veracity may pass un- 
scathed but becomes a target for sus- 
picion. Ever truthful, it may yet be the 
part of wisdom to intrench myself behind 
an array of reputable forebears in order to 
add that ensemble was preserved by a 
voice of unfailing sweetness, in which, 
echo of the glance, was a note of pleading. 
Lip held speech in an adieu so tender 
that even the curt monosyllable, (O Love, 
thou transformer,) issued a Grace. This 



Castles in Spain 63 

quasi-houri had no class. The dilettante, 
methought. But dolce far niente implies 
a perennially, indulgent sky beneath which 
to bask, luscious spontaneity to feed upon. 
Inside the snow-line, for alien as for 
native, to be, is to do 

A week's absence on the part of The 
Kind, and the even tenor of our way un- 
disturbed thereby, disclosed the fact that 
she had in The Sweet not only a potent 
auxiliary, but one capable upon occasions 
of sustaining with credit the leading parts. 

Later, in emergencies, when "help" 
failed to measure up to its requirements, 
I saw her perform the most servile 
drudgery as if to the manner born. 

She was the only one of the Five fur- 
nished with a romance whose details I 
can vouch for. Each had one, fruitful 
theme for the twenty, but as to outline, 

in nubibus. 

. . . . Time — some fifteen years pre- 
vious to my entering the school. The hero 
a young clergyman whose wife had died 
after bearing him three children in rapid 
succession. Two years later he met The 
Sweet. An engagement followed and 



64 Chiefly from 

marriage was impending, when she was 
suddenly left with the entire charge of a 
brother rendered mildly, imbecile by an 
illness. The widowed mother had upon 
her death-bed, extracted a promise from 
her daughter to have personal supervision 
over this unfortunate, upon whom she had 
doted. The estate, by no means ample, 
was to be held in trust for this purpose. 
To have a double charge in the three 
children, seemed impossible ; especially as 
the means of her fiance were equally 
limited. She accordingly urged him to 
marry another, even designating the suit- 
able parti. After a four years' struggle 
he yielded, and the marriage proved 
happy. Her brother's death a year later 
left The Sweet free. About this time the 
clergyman unexpectedly received a leg- 
acy which rendered him independent. 

And yet I reiterate that for her life's 
voyage she had a calm sea. To the un- 
emotional, events are as if they were not. 
Meeting her almost hourly for a series of 
years, I aver that she was phlegmatic in 
proportion as her aspect and life data for- 
shadowed the contrary. . . I never 



Castles in Spain 65 

could detect in her the slightest penchant 
for his daughter, one of our twenty and a 
girl full of charm, over that elicited, say 
by Dora, of dough-face and dead level 
demeanor. If she did not use her stock 
term: "my dear" in addressing our im- 
perturbable chaplain and the "help," Liza, 
Lou and Astarte, her inflection of the 
appellation to which each commonly 
answered, was such as to render it as an 
expression of tender solicitude, equally 
effective. 

Raphaelle, the ex-fiance's daughter, 
chubby, round-faced,rosy-cheeked, bright- 
eyed, enthusiast, arrived her second term 
the victim of a comsuming passion for 
Lord Byron. From her trunk she pro- 
duced a copy, destined to be the mental 
regime of her spare moments. Pounced 
upon by the ever vigilant Good, until it 
could in vacation return to that unhal- 
lowed spot from whence it came, the 
locality of its limbo became problem 
profound, hopeless of solution, a circle- 
route, mocking with its eternal mirage of 
terminus. Where within the sacred pre- 
cincts of Shadow Stream, could be found 



66 Chiefly from 

space that would unblushingly offer terra 
firma for the few square inches of this 
luckless volume? ....... 

Over-taxed, reeling, I hurled 
the query to the very center of that vortex 
from which giant intellects have igno- 
miniously failed to rescue its fellows: 
What becomes of the Pins? and what is 
the origin of the North American Indian? 
The attic was our sanctum. Thither 
fled the pillaged, with a few faithful fol- 
lowers, and before her admiring and com- 
miserating audience, she dramatically 
rehearsed such scraps of her immortal as 
she had with prophetic astuteness com- 
mitted to memory. Among them the lines 
beginning : 

"The Isles of Greece," "Know Ye the 
Land," and "He who hath bent him o'er 
the dead." 

. The fever for declamation 
on, she eked her scanty supply with a 
rendering the most impassioned, of certain 
hymns the memorizing of which our 
godly Principal considered a commen- 
dable part of the curriculum. 
. .. . . Well, the sainted soul below 



Castles in Spain 67 

stairs knows not that attitudes, gestures, 
grimaces, rapid alternations of voiced 
grief, rage, despair, scorn, profaned — but 
now their laurels yet fresh — should seek 
new glories of a muse bearing irre- 
proachable credentials. ...... 

. Better, that Watts, oblivious 
of those strains born of his exile, clay- 
pent, now gives audience to numbers di- 
vine, bends his ear to catch their every 
cadence, that haply he may echo it. . 

Two other daughters had 
been pupils during preceding terms. One, 
Janie, new-issued from the enervating 
indulgence that a feeble constitution de- 
manded, could not brook the sharing with 
twenty, favors, which if concentrated, 
comparison might have found but chilly. 
The Merry, whose room was next, over- 
heard the late-arrived in drenched solilo- 
quy, "woe upon woe, Pelion upon Ossa" — 
the capstone: "And they call me Jane!" 
The Agreeable was a bird of passage. 
Her departures left hopeful awaitings. 
Her arrivals brought fruitful realizations. 
She gleaned from many fields, only the 
choicest tid-bits. Favored those who 



68 Chiefly from 

shared the banquet. Appealing not by 
exterior, a look scarce noted her. The 
record, if made, read : "Faint Dispraise." 
Spare, and rather tall, her aspect was that 
of a tower out of line with its base. It 
was no more willowy, a swaying lithe- 
ness, than it was obesity. By her blind 
preference for gowns of striped fabrics, 
aided and abetted by a black silk apron, 
long and narrow, she gave an impression 
of excess in stature that an actual meas- 
urement would have found erroneous. 
The hair, silvery, seemed plastered over 
her ears. Any tendency to fluffiness was 
carefully guarded against by side-combs. 
The lips were straight lines. The nose 
not of abnormal size, thin, nearly parallel 
with the long, pale face. The eye, in it- 
self nondescript, on becoming a medium, 
that is to say, an organ of speech, was 
her redeeming feature, and like the lips 
of the princess in the fairy tale, dropped 
pearls. Joint almoner with the mouth, 
it doled of the heart's abundance. There 
were times however when it merely saw. 
Then, as I have said, its owner relapsed 
into nonentity. 



Castles in Spain 69 

She was a person of means. In her 
were the makings of a Convention 
woman. Much of her talent in this dir- 
ection ran to waste at Shadow Stream. 
Why then her sojourn here for so many- 
months of the year? My theory — a work 
of time — was that precisely what she 
needed to round up her personality, to 
render her an effective whole, was sup- 
plied in The Kind who was her kins- 
woman 

A dominant requisite for the "one 
talent" is that it may be made a source of 
revenue. Mere Agreeableness, on this 
score, utterly fails to commend itself. 
Yet, I oft mused, were mine for barter 
"goodly pearls," this woman would have 
found in me a ready purchaser for her 
unmarketable "Great Price." This not 
reckoned, her lack of resourcefulness was 
appalling. But when one is past-master 
of a certain art, what will you? 

Surely not that all things might be 
added unto it. Is it not enough to be 
chronicled as Sheridan was by Byron? 
"Poor dear Sherry! I shall never forget 
the day he, and Rogers, and Moore, and 



70 Chiefly from 

I passed together; when he talked, and 
we listened, without one yawn, from six 
till one in the morning." ..... 
For the few is reserved an identity sug- 
gestive of a peripatetic serial, infinite in 
variety, replete with bon-mots. 

Alone, upon a desert island, 
on dit that a mental regime sufficiently 
varied might be found in the Bible and 
Shakespeare — or St. Beuve as a certain 
writer has it. . . . 

. In my mind's eye, to grace 
that festive occasion, enthusiasm, at 
times, substituted for these supplements 
to Holy Writ, The Agreeable 

. Be it known that no surcease 
of duty as my own man Friday was there- 
by anticipated. How little this prospec- 
tive stop-gap differed from a bona fide 
creation of the press, will be understood 
when I say that in her, the sum total of 
the desiderata implied in the word help- 
meet was, dusting and lace knitting. 
Invaluable as proficiency in these may 
render a woman within the pale of civil- 
ization, enabling her at the same time to 
shed lustre unparalleled upon life's path- 



Castles in Spain 71 

way, I fear me that a beach barren of 
befrilled humanity might not accord the 
duo that high consideration indisputably 
their due. 

I surmised that The Good considered 
the presence of this fifth in my sextette 
a dispensation of Providence meekly to 
be endured. An exhortation, involuntary, 
to greater vigilance against the machin- 
ations of "the world and the flesh," to say 
nothing of such mitigated manifestations 
of the third party in this unhallowed 
trinity as are supposed to do duty in 
border warfare. ........ 

The day done, our score was 
divided. Alternately one ten was folded 
by The Good in the school-room, while 
the other joined the group below stairs. 
Thus was I often en rapport with The 
Agreeable — that is to say with a modicum 
of the current news of the day — the latest 
in masterful literature, whether serial or 
in volume, the most recently witnessed 
drama, renowned alike for authorship and 
rendering, snatches sotto voce from the 
latest opera, or best, in an absence more 
prolonged from town; distillations vivi- 



72 Chiefly from 

fied by expression through culture cor- 
porate, pulsating, redundant with life, 
from those wondrous oases, springs of 
Literature ; "lang syne" set aflow in this 
world-desert; founts whereat mortal im- 
mortality may quaff recognition, infinitesi- 
mally faint, of their hid, mysterious Cause, 
against that time when disenthralled, late, 
tutored of trial, body and soul shall be 
fitted to know, to be joint dwellers with 
I Am, upon rich tablelands divine. 

The Sixth it was who had the burden of 
the classes, Music, Art the "Higher Bran- 
ches." True, a Professor came twice a 
week from a neighboring College to in- 
struct in those severer "studies" which 
were in that day considered so abstruse 
that the mind feminine despaired of build- 
ing upon its discernment of them any 

pretentions to pedagogy 

. A single grain of proverbially 
stubborn fact, added to a mass of fancy, 
will often form a whole difficult of man- 
ipulation. This as preface to the an- 
noncement that the Professor was a 
widower— for the sake of variety I fain 



Castles in Spain 73 

would have had him a bachelor— and that 
the Sixth was plain and tending to 
spinsterhood. In her I saw my idea of 
the early Romans. Imprimis, a nose 
that every woman possessor of the like 
would be glad to return to those original 
holders, always providing that she may 
grow in its stead one of the safe variety, 
the nondescript. Her complexion was 
such as I have heard described, dispar- 
agingly, as "flesh and blood," so com- 
pletely it seems, alas, have human nature 
and art, that once were synonyms, been 
rent asunder. .... From this 

beginning, no pleasing ensemble would 
be expected. High cheek-bones, a large 
frame with a minimum of flesh, and that 
inevitable birth-right of one conscious 
that her exterior is not pleasing, a coun- 
tenance severe in repose, and movements 
constrained if not awkward. ..... 

. "She is plain, but she looks 
as if she meant no harm by it," said one 
of a woman not favored by Nature, but 
who had taken her case in hand, like that 
proverbial good house-wife who makes 
soup nine times out of a flint 



74 Chiefly from 

On the contrary, The Pleasant, so we 
called her, failing to acquaint herself with 
the nature of her enemy, as one who 
must either be conciliated or taken by 
stratagem, made the grievous mistake of 
proclaiming war to the knife, her raiment 
being ordinarily of that cotton fabric 
known as "double-purple," the hues 
swearing, as the French say, at each 
other, with a hatred all the more intense 
from their being of the same household. 
To this hostile duo, there was the Gospel 
accompaniment of "fine linen," but the 
portion in evidence, a wide collar, had lost 
in a succession of crossings and counter- 
crossings with such deteriorating in- 
fluences as stiffening and gloss, all of that 
blessed and grace-conferring attribute 
which renders it at first hand, the patron 
saint of hard lines. .... This of 
the corporate. The incorporate however, 
was sovereign. Anon, to assert pre- 
rogative over the cheek was flung as 
banner a blush, the legend: "Love, In- 
telligence;" and straightway one left off 
conning homely lineaments of clay, to 
spell from this soul-message: Beauty. 



PART II— Continued 



PART n-Continued 

. Material for romance out- 
side of legend, had hitherto been totally 
lacking at Shadow Stream, the Professor, 
about forty, and The Pleasant, not yet 
thirty, having just succeeded two super- 
annuated instructors. . Pure 
Fiction, illimitable, would, I grant, scorn 
central figures so ripe. But a basis of 
Fact implies choice more or less mundane, 
within bounds less shadowy, like the be- 
reaved neighbor to whom I paid a visit 
of condolence: "Yes," sighed she, "to 
be sure she wasn't the best of mothers, 
still she was a mother." ..... 
Carisabel, one of the clev- 
erest of modern essayists, says : "A mole 
on the cheek, a glint of sun-lit hair, a 
pathetic little voice, a shadow under 
wistful eyes, is often reason enough for 
the wisest man to ask a woman to become 
his wife. .... I have no re- 



78 Chiefly from 

membrance of a girl-hood so callow as 
not to find me an incipient match-maker. 
Mature, I am like that old woman of 
Thackeray's, in whose eyes life was an 
eternal love-match, and who never could 
see two young people together without 
fancying they were dying for each other. 
By this token, although not present, 
I was able to fix with a considerable de- 
gree of certainty, the moment when the 
Professor first saw my heroine in her 
true colors, that is to say, by the light of 
her blush. A comparison of the shades 
in manner during their witnessed en- 
counters before and after, was my for- 
mula Gradations subtile, and 

quite impossible of discernment by mere 
lay vision, but to me definite, nay, bold of 
outline as is the contact of that patient 
commingling of life's whole motley: 
White (color sublimated) with Black, 
who, muffled, pusillanimous, flees the 
Hand that proffers charged mortar and 
potential pestle, escapes, only to be en- 
gulfed by voracious unfathomable Shad- 
ow — Nothingness. 



Castles in Spain 79 

The personality that by my mental 
decree was to wed this Blush, could not 
boast in the matter of exterior, many 
odds of comeliness over The Pleasant. 
Spare, pale, serious-looking, although 
apparently robust, so hollow-jawed was 
he, that but one of our twenty had en- 
durance sufficient so to contract her rosy 
cheeks, well chalked for the occasion, as 
to act this part in our game of "Types." 
. I was in high feather. In- 
terest in the Blush had become matter for 
general comment, "and it grew, and it 
grew," emulating Mr. Finney's Turnip, 
when I was suddenly confronted with 
the truth that "the course of true love 
never does run smooth." Fact, it ap- 
pears, avails nothing, as a premise. Not 
alone on the page of Fiction, where har- 
rowing detail is preeminent as a promoter 
of popularity in proportion inverse to 
one's deprecation of it as a matter of ac- 
tual experience, does this great stream 
erotic oppose to continuous fretting a 
ceaseless, plaintive moan; to gigantic, 
sullen, barrier Titanic, thundering might. 



80 Chiefly from 

The Pleasant's previous history as she 
incidentally gave it to me had for definite 
outline: That she with her parents had 
come from their native England some 
seven years before. That she had since 
been orphaned of both. That the fact of 
their being the last of their line had ren- 
dered each singularly destitute of all kin- 
dred save the most distant. .... 
Chief among the day's 
events at Shadow Stream was the arrival 
of the mail bag. Each greedily munch- 
ing her own dole of epistolary nutriment, 
recked in general little of her neighbors 
fare. So the occasional arrival for The 
Pleasant of a letter bearing a foreign post- 
mark, and addressed ever in the same 
bold, masculine hand, occasioned no com- 
ment. 

A day came however, when, being out in 
full force, owing to fine weather, and 
chaperoned by The Pleasant, we en- 
countered the Professor driving through 
the open gate-way. He had en passant 
captured the mail bag. The stage coach 
as a rule threw it out at the coachman's 
opposite. We eagerly followed the post- 



^fc 




=~Lr^-' i 




> 



i i 



V 



" A letter was tendered The Pleasant " 



FACING PAGE 80 



Castles in Spain 81 

man. In the hall stood The Kind who 
made the distribution. As usual, each 
became intent upon her particular share 
and either bore it off or stood reading. 
As I was about to leave with mine, a 
letter was tendered The Pleasant by way 
of the Professor who stood between. 
The masculine hand alone was cause suf- 
ficient to arrest a glance, owing to his 
deepening interest in the addressed, and 
the foreign stamp fixed it. As she took 
the missive, their eyes met. Her face, 
paling, revealed commingled terror, an- 
ger, hopeless sadness. Had she received 
it with a smile, or even gravely calm, he 
would have doubtless presaged a sequel 
inconsequential. As it was, months 
passed without record of aught that could 
silence his doubt or banish the trinity of 
misery brooding in her bosom. 

Words had no part in my apprisal of 
these facts. At intervals, a witness when 
the two met in the exercise of their pro- 
fessional engagements, I read in his 
glance, lanced and withdrawn in a flash: 
"I loved unquestioning. I still love, but 
now I also doubt." In hers, fluttering as 



82 Chiefly from 

on maimed pinion: "I too love, but this 
doubt, yawning chasm betwixt us, ready 
to engulf freight of affection expressed 
from thee to me, from me to thee, I am 
powerless to span. For aught I know, 
this must so be until Time surrenders to 
Duration unmeasured. Then will set in 
Inflow transcendent, offering safe convoy 
for all love found deathless." .... 
. The close of the next term 
found me prepared to spend that vaca- 
tion or part of it, at Shadow Stream, 
self-constituted nurse of The Pleasant. 
The one girl from abroad who was not to 
go home until the end of her several years' 
course, became my eager assistant, so 
dear was the stricken to us all. Our Pro- 
fessor, resident at the College, rode over 
daily, anxiously questioning. One there 
was, hospitably sheltered for the time, 
who bent over that sick bed in a grief 
that seemed torture. The week previous 
had seen his advent, under circumstances 
similar to the arrival of his last letter. 

As then, out in group under a fine sun, 
we met the Professor, not as yet however, 
arrived at the gateway. In his wake 



Castles in Spain 83 

lumbered the stage coach, which pres- 
ently stopped full — not for the sake of the 
mail-pouch that could be tossed to the ex- 
pectant coachman without a halt, but to 
let down a passenger— a gentleman. . 
. . . The next moment the Pleasant 
was a heap, apparently lifeless, upon the 

roadside. 

Twice had my charge re- 
gained consciousness, her expression pla- 
cid as she met the anxious gaze of her 
several attendants, until her eye rested 
upon the stranger, when with a look of 
terror, she relapsed. I reported this to 
the physician when he came, and found 

me alone with the patient 

. "Either he is a knave, or the 
counterpart of some wretch whom she be- 
lieves him to be," said he testily. "To you, 
madam," continued he, addressing the 
Good, who now entered," this man find- 
ing lodgment here, was seen to deliver a 
sealed packet. Its contents, as yet un- 
known it seems, to any of the household 
save yourself, have given you I am sure 
every assurance of the bearer's worth, as 
you not only accord him hospitality, but 



84 Chiefly from 

treat him with the utmost consideration. 
The woman lying here must have some 
painful misconception, either of the per- 
son's identity or of his standing. I sug- 
gest that you read this paper to her when 
appearances indicate her ability to grasp 
its purport. 

For a time, his visits to the sick must 
cease. In her weak condition, repetition 
of the shock his presence occasions might 
prove fatal." 

Only the doctor was present at the 
reading, which, a few days after, condi- 
tions made possible. The facts given were 
not made known to the household, until 
the Pleasant restored to health, disclosed 
them herself. 

When alone with me during her con- 
valescence, she frequently expressed a 
wish to discuss the subject, but I urged 
quiet to see that the unknown, Felix she 
called him, was now a visitor whose pres- 
ence brought healing instead of bane — 
sufficed me. 

Felix, she related, was her brother, sev- 
eral years her junior. Left in Europe to 
complete his course at a University, 



Castles in Spain 85 

when she with her parents came to the 
United States, partly in pursuit of health, 
and partly to watch some property inter- 
ests, he appeared to be developing nobili- 
ty of character. On a certain night of 
fete, he joined two of his class. Wine got 
the mastery of him. Later, he was found, 
not as yet fully recovered, beside the dead 
body of the one. The other, returning 
shortly after the discovery, acknowledged 
that he had been of the party, that all had 
been drinking, with exchange of high 
words. But he averred that up to the time 
of his going out to order certain supplies, 
the same arriving in the course of his tes- 
timony, no shooting had occurred. 

Apparent verification of this account, it 
appears, was not wanting. Every bit of 
time, there. No gap. Moment matched 
moment to a nicety. No appearance of tri- 
turation announced in thunder tones the 
absence of a crumb. The statement of 
Felix sober was as incoherent as had been 
that of Felix drunk. His memory had not 
made a single registry of that night. *For 



* — See the case of Mrs. Ada Gilbert 
Dennis, Washington, D. C, Dec, igoi. 



86 Chiefly from 

aught he knew to the contrary, he was 
guilty. ....... His par- 
ents, not strong, were fatally prostrated 
by the tidings. The orphaned sister — - 
strive as she might, could think of him, 
but with mingled shame, anger, and de- 
spair. In her one letter to him, she did 
not fully reveal this. She permitted his 
letters, but he was not to expect replies. 

The case bade fair to swell the list of 
judicial puzzles. Public sentiment ad- 
judged Felix guilty. But the counter- 
weight — Absence of Proof ! 

Pending the decision, "the other," as I 
have called him had a summons, to the 
bar of Heaven. With his dying breath, he 
confessed the crime, and revealed, how 
taking advantage of Felix's condition, he 
had hazarded his testimony; how, at the 
elbow of his every movement, had stood 
Circumstance, an eager, nay, an importun- 
ing second. 

For this lapse, preceded as it had been 
by a career strictly honorable, Felix ob- 
tained plenary pardon. Disciplined by 
error acknowledged and repented of, his 



Castles in Spain 87 

self-respect— heretofore evidenced but by 
qualities admirable, mere leaf and blos- 
som—now richly fruited into lovableness, 
and capacity for burden-sharing. . . . 
. The packet bore attestation 
ample and unquestionable. A duplicate, 
forwarded to his sister, and which would 
have prepared her for his arrival, appear- 
ed to have miscarried. ...... 

. The sanctum at Shadow Stream 
was "The Right Room." Entering by a 
door at one end of the hall transept, you 
faced two bays, separated by an open fire- 
place. These windows had a southern 
aspect:— The terraced slope of the lawn, 
where — fended from Boreal wrath— grass 
kept "dapper and pert and sassy, and 
sassy and dapper and pert," from June to 
June. Beyond, and ranging with the 
house, an enclosed parallelogram of veg- 
etable garden, divided lengthwise by a 
grass-plat, presumably a bleaching- 
ground, whose ample width suggested 
roadway for a coach and six. Not of gross 
matter — wheel and hoof expectantly steel- 
ed against heartless, defiant flint— but such 



88 Chiefly from 

as a wand might conjure ; one that would 
not shame immaculate, wheeless Broek; 
wheel in whose track rose dust impalpa- 
ble — the mutely, clattering hoof of whose 
prancing, curveting steed awoke echo 
noiseless. . . Still beyond, through a 
section of meadow, flowed a broad 
stream. In the wake of this Memnon mo- 
tion, coquetting now with right bank, 
now with left, followed Beauty, to set a 
curve, to levy from the passing seasons 
wherewith to deck it. . "Beauty 

is dead," sighed Winter. But the immor- 
tal only caught napping, transfixed the 
sigh, when, presto ! there lay the snow- 
wreath. "I'll none of this pallid crown 
for Earth" blustered March, "as well a fil- 
let of iron." And the spurned, murmur- 
ing "Resurgam" sank shroudless into its 
grave, while sudden, sun-crowned zephyr- 
chasing April's tears, echoed: "Aye, 'tis 
but an au revoir." And at that bugle note, 
the dead arose, — Protean. . . . For 
her wooer's May smile, a Flora wan — 
shy. Flush reluctant, but pronounced, an- 
swered June's caress. Summer's ardor re 
fleeted acme of glow. . . . .... 



Castles in Spain 89 

. "Love is growing cold," chanted 
Autumn, to the music of Aeolus' harp. 
And at the first averted look of the Sun- 
god — Flora, all Affection's scarlet livery 
prone about her, hid in 'tire of Pride, dis- 
covered shame, — stood erect, scornful, re- 
gally splendid with purple and gold, be- 
fore her fickle lord „ ^ 

. At one end, the Right Room 
was divided by a portiere from the par- 
lor. At the opposite, by a sliding sash 
from the conservatory. The prevailing 
tint of wall and carpet was green. The 
maple wood-work's smile no stress of 
weather dimmed. Every seat offered com- 
fort. Sewing-machine, work-basket, em- 
broidery-frame, sketching materials — oc- 
cupation. An upright piano, brackets 
filled with books, various games hid in 
presses — amusement. 

In those same wall cupboards were 
stored also, toys galore, all prematurely 
aged from leading too fast a life, some 
giving unmistakable signs of approaching 
dissolution. Though this home was 
childless, Brookbend contained store nu- 
merous and varied from which to borrow : 



90 Chiefly from 

Boys, whose shoes, supposedly the seat 
of noise, were left upon the threshold in 
exchange for slippers. Sampson shorn 
of his locks ; "howbeit the hair of his head 
began to grow again after he was shaven." 
Girls, of assorted sizes, but oth- 
erwise of aspect identical as the prover- 
bial two peas : Hair, nut-brown, abundant, 
ringlety. Eyes, small, dark, twinkling. 
Lips and cheeks of vivid red, against 
milky whiteness. 

This living-room, methought, persona- 
ted Utility: Small of stature, comely, 
smiling, light of foot, gown immaculate, 
and of a fabric warranted to "wash." . 
In awful contrast was the par- 
lor. At the threshold, an air of : "Tickets, 
please," curbed my presumptuous step. 
. "Hands off!" cried in unison four 
great, glazed cabinets, one for each cor- 
ner. Securely locked, they were reposi- 
tories for gifts, rare, beautiful, and costly, 
received on various fete days, during a 
long series of years by the ladies as a 
school, from their pupils collectively. 

Above the mantel, and of a size nearly 
equalling the great chimney-piece, hung 



Castles in Spain 91 

a framed tapestry, wrought by the Good : 
A boy, yet in his infancy, being led by a 
woman along a pebbly roadway, crossed 
by a shallow "run." The mother's pose, 
as she bends to suit the baby stature, is 
exquisite. They have reached the brink. 
. Awful chasm! It is not the 
water he fears. Its coaxing voice is music. 
His home brook he oft chooses for a play- 
fellow, and the tiny hands and feet find 
pleasure — all the sweeter for being forbid- 
den, in the luring toy. ...... 

. But this side is all he knows as yet. 
Beyond is voiceless. . . Barrier, to 
three years, but says : "I fend." Its after- 
voice : "Progress — Life, passes. Stag- 
nation — Death, stays," only a schooled ear 
catches. 

Responsive to the tightening grasp, and 
uplifted, appealing eye, she sends a gaze 
tender, solicitous. But for wonted offer 
of the sheltering arms, he hears: "Be 
brave." Vocabulary strange; offering, 
mystery unsolvable. But instinct with 
filial obedience, one tyro foot, cautiously 
but firmly planted before its fellow, seems 
boldly essaying trial of this new chart. . 



92 Chiefly from 

. The bays of the Right Room ex- 
tended to the chamber above, occupied by 
the Merry. Below, costless exuberance. 
Above, affluent severity. . . . The 
polished oaken floor was uncovered, save 
for a skin of lynx or bear before some fav- 
ored seat of cane, and a great dull-color- 
ed oriental rug in front of the wide fire- 
place, with its fender and irons of brass. 
The walls were wainscoted. An alcove, 
open to view, held a bedstead of brass, the 
cylindric bolster, the coverlet, and canopy, 
white. Another, screened by a hanging 
of costly India stuff and lighted by an 
oval, served as dressing-room. A chiffo- 
nier and table, together with seats of var- 
ied design, were of polished oak, with sur- 
face unbroken by any chasing in whose 
crevices dust might lurk. There were two 
portraits— forebears of the Merry, one saw 
at a glance. One, of a mailed warrior, 
near which was a suit of armor, with a 
sword and scabbard of fine workmanship. 
The other a Diana, from whose frame de- 
pended a bow and a quiver of arrows. 
Bracketed shelves above the chimney- 
piece offered a study in vases. Besides, 



Castles in Spain 93 

tapers in sconces, a harp, a guitar, and a 
disk of burnished steel, which was the one 
mirror. . . ....... 

. It was beside the cradle of her 
infant, Felicia, that the Pleasant-wife of 

Professor , told me that a certain 

letter, duplicate of a sealed packet, and 
wherein was announced Felix's innocence, 
together with the date of his intended ar- 
rival, was the identical one that she re- 
ceived in the presence of the Professor. 

. Believing it to be but an itera- 
tion of its sad predecessors, and piqued at 
its untimely arrival, she had destroyed it 
without breaking the seal. 



TOW SPINNINGS 
R. F, D, 



TOW SPINNINGS 



R. F. a 

Up down has been struck 
out of existence. And we have not had a 
cyclone, either. It has been deprived of 
its Post-office. And that, too, after the 
village had reached the respectable 
age of one hundred years. It boasted also 
that one man had been Post-master there, 
as well as law-writer and surveyor, for 
forty consecutive years. But that was in 
the nineteenth century's beginning, when 
a man was a patriot and a citizen, rather 
than a voter — be he Whig or Democrat. 

The Post-office closed ! Dies Irae I Our 
mail, for a space was to be suspended, like 
Mahomet's coffin. . . . After wait- 
ing both patiently and impatiently, I re- 
ceived three letters. The first from the 
hands of the parson. (Heaven lent its 
messenger in Earth's dire strait). The 



98 Chiefly from 

second by a small boy, name unknown. 
(Mayhap an imp. Was our case then 
moving even Hades to pity?) Number 
three I had to agonize for. . . Time— 
10 P. M., in the dead of winter. The 
heavens like a pall, moonless, starless. 
Lantern in hand, I gathered my skirts 
about me, and crossed the muddy road, to 
fish my letter, at the imminent risk of get- 
ting my fingers full of splinters, out of a 
box labelled Oswego Starch, nailed to a 
telephone-pole. . . There were other 
letters, not for me. Updown had for the 
nonce, returned to apostolic times. We 
had all things in common. There is a the- 
ory, I am told, that matter has no exist- 
ence, all is mind. 

Another theory is, that all matter, even 
inert, in endued with consciousness, intel- 
ligence. I rather incline to this last. 

The letter, who must have been a mind- 
reader, seeing my perplexed, wandering 
gaze — I had forgotten my glasses, took 
the initiative, and sought my hand. It re- 
quired an immediate answer. Now with 
no Joseph to warn me, I had been living 
from hand to mouth, so to speak, in the 



Castles in Spain 99 

matter of stamps, and the famine was 
grievous in the land — not one left. . . . 
What to do with my reply, even if I had a 
stamp! "Local men have local ideas." 
Ideas limited in number and restricted in 
extent. At the Post-office I had mailed 
my letters, there also I had procured 
stamps. It was the heart of my existence 
as a commercial being. Without it, I was 
motionless, pulseless. 

It took full seven days to reconstruct 
my world out of this enforced chaos. At 
the end of that time I was still pulseless, 
but no longer motionless. A machine — a 
carrier's cart — (a Post-office on wheels 
they call it) galvanized me into an auto- 
maton. 

I found it wheeled sure enough, one 
rough winter morning when I needed a 
money-order. I never could catch any- 
thing on the fly, even in my most active 
days. With an eye to the fitness of things, 
the carrier himself is a mercury, i. e., 
winged. He has strict government or- 
ders not to leave his post. He will deposit 
your mail in a box placed on the road-side 
for that purpose, but as he does this with- 



100 Chiefly from 

out alighting — on the wing— so to speak, 
it may be said that he and his cart— brook- 
like— "go on forever." 

For the opposition, there is a Postal 
Station, where you may have your mail 
left. "You pays your money and you 
takes your choice." There is an opposi- 
tion, and some of us have been destroying 
mail-boxes on lonely by-ways, and if we 
are not careful, we may find ourselves in 
the penitentiary. We have three general 
government boxes. Receptacles that some 
of us had to learn how to use. Set up here, 
each looks like a Cockney out of the sound 
of Bow-bells. A few of us, who pass our 
winters in the city, have the like, but smal- 
ler, before our houses. But of the rest, it 
may be said that they are a motley crew, 
of all shapes and sizes, and bearing many 
marks of previous condition of serviture. 
My neighbor, the spinster, has a natty- 
looking little affair labeled Mellin's Food. 
Some such one, I was surprised 
to find, before the door of one of our gran- 
dees. I made free to remark upon it. Said 
he, "I'll let you know, I'm not a going to 
set up no brown-stone-front box for sich 
an institootion." 



Castles in Spain 101 

At first we were cautioned to have our 
mail addressed: Hilldale (our nearest 
railroad station) care Carrier No. — . . 

. Now Hilldale is a thing of yester- 
day. It came into being when the screech 
of the locomotive first reached our cen- 
tury-old village. ... I am choleric. 
When I saw my letter I grew hot. My 
neighbor isn't— she only laughed, as she 
glanced at hers, and said: "First time I 
ever knew I lived at Hilldale." . 

. But we had to be conciliated, we 
of the opposition. Now, our address is: 
Updown Station, R. F. D.— Care Carrier 
No.—. 

N. B.— R. F. D. means Rural Free De- 
livery. 



TOW SPINNINGS 



FRAGMENTS OF A LETTER 



TOW SPINNINGS 
FRAGMENTS OF A LETTER 



. I have just re-read "Re- 
liques Of The Christ." A book, as some 
one says—that is not for the "way-faring 
man," and that "he who runs may not 
read.' " One stanza so blends with an- 
other in the delicate shades of thought 
that detached quotation seems like a de- 
fining of the interfused bands of the rain- 
bow. You may thus have one, two—sev- 
eral splendid colors, but seven alone leave 
in your mind the whiteness, the clear, 
shining whole. .... There were 
seven colors in the rain-bow when I went 
to school. I think I read, several years 
since, that the number has changed. I 
have a budget in my mind sacredly label- 
ed: "Truths." Among the contents are 
several now-called absurdities, errors, 
myths.- Do I disturb said contents? Do 



106 Chiefly from 

I classify and re-classify? Sort out? Not 
I. In this wonder-conjuring age, I feel 
fore-doomed to perish ignominiously in 
the ditch of Ignorance, and I have con- 
cluded to die comfortably, without a 
struggle. .......... 

"I wonder if in Nazareth, 

By heedless feet o'er run, 
There lingers yet some dear relique 

Of work by Joseph's son; 
Some carved thought, some tool of toil, 

Some house with stones grown gray, 
A house He built who had not where 

His weary head to lay."* 

Frederick W. Robertson, 
too, in his wondrous sermons, speculates 
and speculates, reverently and sweetly, 
upon our Lord's earthly career. He set- 
tles no questions. This is one of his 
charms. He finds you ruminating and he 
leaves you ruminating. ...... 

A certain periodical asked a number of 
the thinkers of the day to name ten nine- 
teenth century books that each considered 
among the most masterly. On three of the 



*Reliques Of The Christ. By Denis 
Wortman. 



Castles in Spain io7 

lists was Renan's Life of Jesus. 

. 'Tis a book that for its style I take 
to my very heart. And its heterodoxy is 
less than weak. It is so absurd as to be 
harmless. The work is even used by Sun- 
day-schools, as a reference for topogra- 
phy, etc. . . . In so many words, 
Renan sets down that our Lord is a mere 
man, and straightway depicts a humanity 
exalted to Divinity itself, before which he 
prostrates himself in passionate adoration. 
As one reads on, there comes the feeling 
of being out of doors in fine weather. The 
life depicted is ideal, exquisite, unconfin- 
ed. Over head, for the most part, naught 
but the magnificent sky-dome, raying 
golden sun-light, or soft star-beams. Un- 
der foot the sweet, sweet Earth, here lily- 
decked, there channeled with sparkling 
lake and river. Around Jesus — at His 
very side — His elect, those into whose ear 
alone He breathed His love-message : "I 

have chosen you." 

. I am forced to think, and I 
conclude it reverently, that in all save His 
Divine Spirit — in mind, no less than in 
body — He was strictly of the family of 



108 Chiefly from 

Mary. ... If He excelled as a car- 
penter, He inherited through His human 
parent a faculty for application or a skill 
in handicraft. His shrinking from bodily 
pain, that Revelation chronicles in the: 
"Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
from Me" — His "marred" visage— seems 
to bear out this. And both but serve 
to bring Him into closer touch with 
humanity. 

. A being springing into life Miner- 
va-like, with body artistically perfect, 
with mind all-comprehensive, we could 
not— I take it — accept, in all fairness, as a 
model. We that heredity now blesses, 
now bans; we who are now handicapped, 
now wind-winged, by a pre-natal force. 



But love supreme, unceasing, from age 
to age, idealizes this earth-form that lent 
itself to God, this Mary-mind that Deity 
stooped to borrow 

There is a book : "The Gospel of the In- 
fancy of Jesus." . . . And why not? 
. . . The legends that go to make it 
up may have sprung from facts. Truths 



Castles in Spain 109 

transmitted reverently from father to son, 
adown the ages. . . . What is faith, 
and what is superstition? 

. In my most thankless hours, 
when life seems all rind and bitter at that, 
let a stray morsel of humor be furnished 
forth to garnish the feast withal, and pres- 
to! I am forthwith enabled to extract 
some savor. I am just returned from a 
funeral. As the deceased had resided at 
some distance from the church and ad- 
joining the cemetery, he very considerate- 
ly made a dying request that the burial 
precede the sermon. But the traditional 
village custom — suffering thereby in its 
amour-propre— thrilled with protest. . 
How fill the hiatus left by no invitation 
to "view the remains?" . . What hap- 
pened — what, of all things? The singing 
of "Praise God from whom all blessings 
flow." . . . Nov/, X, if thou chance 
to be master of ceremonies at my taking 
off, let there be no Te Deum, even if, in 
the words of Rhoda Broughton, " A very 
small bottle might hold the tears shed 
upon that occasion." Let all meagreness 



110 Chiefly from 

of material befitting the obsequies be dis- 
creetly veiled. 

But to return from my funeral, to the 
other. Yes, the officiating, said: "Let us 
rise and sing, 'Praise God from whom all 
blessings flow.' "... .... 

. The choir, which at the opening 
exercises had promptly responded to the 
announcement of "Hark! from the tomb," 
remained for one brief moment mute. . . 
In that flash of pause, two "long, long 
thoughts" I am morally certain, became 
the common property of priest and peo- 
ple. . . . Thought No. i: "Oh, for 

an ever-abiding sense of the fitness of 
things." . . . Thought No. 2: "But 
when you find you have nailed the wrong 
colors to the mast, beyond recall, clinch 

them." 

Apropos of the fitness of 
things, whole pages of science might be 
reduced to the value of waste paper by the 
tenue of that parson. A man with a wife 
and nine children, a citizen upright, down- 
right, staid, prosaic, an evangelist ; yet in 
feature, physique, an Apollo. Prodigal of 
gesture in oratory, posing with a grace to 



Castles in Spain 111 

satisfy the soul of an artist, making in the 
brief turn from desk to chair, three sepa- 
rate and distinct movements of the 
shoulders, describing as many lines of 
beauty. In short, an outward and visible 
Rev. Charles Honeyman. But that worthy 

improved by avoirdupois 

. You express yourself well, 
X, in the paper submitted to my inspec- 
tion. You are not as yet guilty of the 
national, the inter-national indiscriminate 
use of the word nice. But beware, for I 
notice it appears in your repertoire well- 
polished with frequent use, whilst per- 
chance full many of its more worthy but 
less enticing fellows are born to exist un- 
seen. One of Disraeli's best types, the 
Portuguese, is made to say : "The English 
language consists of four words: nice, 
charming, jolly and bore, and some gram- 
marians add fond." 



LETTER FROM A HORN- 
BOOK DAME 



LETTER FROM A HORN- 
BOOK DAME 

A recent newspaper article causes me to 
grow reminiscent. The writer, it appears, 
has just entered the ranks of those who 
for years have been endeavoring to drag 
from its sacred shrine into the light of 
common day that dignified fetich — A 
Classical Course in Education. I remem- 
ber that "lang syne," among the very first 
who armed themselves for this ignoble 
purpose was one of that day's foremost 
thinkers. To be sure, his weapon was 
nothing but a nineteenth century femi- 
nine bodkin, and not that formidable, un- 
draped, immortal instrument that stands 
between "to be, or not to be." — Which 
see: — "No one admires more than I, the 
subtle, indescribable fineness, both of 
thought and diction, which a thorough, 
classical course of education gives to the 
scholar. But its absence there is not so 



116 Chiefly from 

deplorable as that display of cheap learn- 
ing which makes the American oratory of 
thirty and fifty years ago, a national hu- 
miliation. Even in its best form it was 
bedizened with a classical tinsel which 
bespeaks the vanity of the half-taught 
scholar." 

"Et tu Brute !" Thou didst aim to 

"down" a fellow-prince, in order to reach 
over his prostrate body, the donkey in 

lion's skin 

Without our thorough, classical scholar, 
the world wouldn't go round, I assure you. 
"We should do our utmost to encourage 
the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages 
itself." 

The introspective should be ministered 
to, as forming part of humanity. The 
silent minority of earth, for whom "bread 
alone" is but a "stone," without the savor 
of beauty in speech or form. . . This 
little band, La Rochefoucauld must have 
had in mind when he wrote : "Superflui- 
ties have been defined as things we cannot 

do without." 

For the practical side,—- years 
ago, when education was for the most 



Castles in Spain 117 

part, the privilege o£ the leisure class, and 
the strictly scientific course was not, as it 
sometimes now is, a necessity, a certain 
College organized a course in science 
which required no knowledge of Greek 
and but a slight acquaintance with Latin. 
After an experience of ten years, it was 
found that the best work in science was 
done by those thoroughly grounded in the 
classics 

This same newspaper correspond- 
ent entertains us with a dissertation upon 
what he is pleased to call "back-country 
schools" — which, by the way, is admirable 
for the reading of people who know bread 

from stones 

But pray, why are the poor schools in 
question, so often the victims of the cen- 
sor-critic — the how-not-to-do oracle ? — 
Probably because, as Disraeli says: "The 
best critics are those who have failed." . 

. There are still, in this twentieth 
century, even in this past-progressive Uni- 
ted States, some schools whose sole cur- 
riculum is still the "three R's — readin', 
ritin' and 'rithmetic," albeit it, it is one 
that teacher and pupils covertly hate. I for 



118 Chiefly from 

one, devoutly wish that a knowledge of 
the trio could be born with us. Then, but 
not till then, I should join the radicals, 
whose watch-word is skilled labor and 
whose schools are work-shops— places 
where childhood's exuberance, which is 
now so often a force that mars, may be- 
came wholly a force that makes. . Upon 
this, I quote from an article recently seen : 
"We cannot get away entirely from the 
'wooden' system until all our teachers are 
trained and experienced. ..... 

. The striking difference be- 
tween the old and the new education is 
concisely stated when we say that the 
'three H's' have taken the place of the 
'three R's.' That system which will 
reach and harmoniously develop the head, 
the heart, and the hand, for the ends of 
complete living, will perhaps accomplish 
most for the individual and most for the 
State." 

. Away at the poles of peda- 
gogy, but a few feeble rays from the great 
life-giving centers can reach. . . We 
aspire, but alas, as St. Beuve says : "Aspir- 
ations are not plans" — no, only the vesti- 



Castles in Spain 119 

bule. . 

. Here, in this region of long 
nights and feebly-lit days, 'tis only the 
born teacher, he whose unerring instinct, 
ycleped tact, holds school-boards, trustees, 
parents, and pupils in the hollow of his 
hand, that may enter into the sanctuary 
of a carried-out plan. . . The rest of 
us are so many birch-armed Mr. Tullivers. 

Likewise, in the world at large, there is 
the one who persistently stares at his own 
infirmities, and another — like our born 
teacher — a man who believes in himself, 
nay, more, who may carry self-glorifica- 
tion to the point of absurdity. With this 
last, achievement is in part, spontaneous. 
A "greatness thrust upon" him, as it were. 
For eleven hours of life's day, he idly 
saunters where "all goes merry as a mar- 
riage-bell." For the one hour, he has him- 
self set to "dress and keep" an Eden ; picks 
stray weeds from paths whose wildness 
the hand of toil has already curbed; 
trains vines which the sweat of another's 
brow has so pruned, chastened, that just 
one more effective touch is needed to 



120 Chiefly from 

crown them things of beauty, unfailing 
wells of joy; earns the "penny" that, 
fresh from the mint, and so, having never 
shared the outrageous fortune of the Man 
with the Hoe, sees naught in the untried 
world, but the reflection of its own shin- 
ing face Moreover, the 

hand into which that coin is dropped is 
fair as alabaster, with a palm tinted like 
the lip of a shell, and finger-tips of tiny 
rose-petals peeping through translucent 
pearls. .... "All these things 
will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and 
worship" — Self. 

That other — who is no skimpole or tur- 
veydrop — goes through life, as I have said, 
fatally handicapped from seeing with full 
vision his own short-comings; not being 
blest with a "blind side," and having fail- 
ed to practice that most convenient alter- 
native known as "shutting one eye." . . 
. But even for him— yea, for us 
all, there is one line ever open, wherein we 
may excel : The path of saint-ship — to be 
good — to be serene against the ugliest 
odds. In this, did we but truly wish ex- 
cellence, we might obtain; for there are 



Castles in Spain 121 

no barriers here, and no "thus fars." No 
knowledge needed of Greek, of music, of 
skilled labor. — -Only to go to the utmost 
in patience, in good works, in good-heart- 
edness. This last is the very widest ave- 
nue. One may do the neighbor good, but 
oh, for the saintly blindness that fails to 
see the neighbor's faults. ..... 

. Faint-Heart, does a sense 
of failure weigh thee to the very dust, 
even whilst thou art drunken with a sense 

of life's glorious possibilities? Rise, 

and walk along the celestial road, there 
thou mayest pass, rest assured, without 
being jostled, even with thine arms 
akimbo. 



FRAGMENTS OF A LETTER 



FRAGMENTS OF A LETTER 



I have heard 



lecture. I had all my expectations of de- 
light realized, and yet he is totally different 
to my conception of him. I thought he 
would be at least serious, if not pale and 
melancholy of aspect, and tall, and spare. 
He has a laughing eye. Fancy our 

with such an outlook ! There 

is no humor in his looks, is there? He is 
below the medium in height, and not an- 
gular. His face is suffused with a rare 
glow— a tint sublimated yet pronounced 
enough to indicate health. The nose is 
good, but lacks the fineness of — Byron's 
for instance, — There is your perfect nose ! 
One's hand is charged with character 
which no freedom from manual labor may 
conceal and no amount of toil may oblit- 
erate. - 's— which stopped just 

short of plumpness, proclaimed him that 
most blest of all beings, the cock-sure- 



126 Chiefly from 

man, — one getting the keenest enjoyment 
out of material good, because matter with 
him is in the leash of mind. . . At 
the applause he looked as a child. . 
There are many smiles,— the silly, the of- 
fensive—which alas, is not meaningless. 

• 's is the primeval, the smile of 

one who feels good. . . . What 
most impressed me as I looked and listen- 
ed, was his finish. Some one says that 
the life of the half-trained man or woman 
is a tragedy. ... I have in my 
mind's eye as I write, an ideal world. The 
Earth is ideal for the most part, and God- 
planted gardens everywhere realize for us 
the legend of Eden. My Utopia is made 

up of s, — that is to say, of people 

of genius or of downright talent in liter- 
ature, art, handicraft — with "hewers of 
wood and drawers of water" to serve 
them. The great majority of human 
beings, the average, the half-trained men 
and women, whose lives are tragedies, — 
I most certainly, you mayhap — would be 
ruled out, annihilated, as cumberers of the 
ground. What a long, dismal procession 
towards Eternal Nothingness! Dante's 



Castles in Spain 127 

Inferno, methinks, becomes less ardent 
in face of this appalling alternative — the 
loss of the ego. 

I am glad existence was vouchsafed me 
until I could swing my little censer under 
the mortal nose of this immortal. . 
Physiognomy coquettes. I have known 
a number of people with true Byronic 
noses, who made no career whatever. I 
am bound to say, however, that they tried 
to. ........... ,. 

. A woman with neither kith nor 
kin in this community, oft-times alone in 
the silent village house, my mind rings 
the changes on the two poems: "The 
Last Leaf" and "The Last Man." 
Pathos : — 

"The names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 
On a tomb." 

And tragedy : — 

Every name save one — his own — be- 
come naught but "such stuff as dreams 
are made of." ......... 

. I, for one, lay claim to some 
hours that are aimless, purposeless, col- 
orless, — to others, wherein petty cares 
grow big with pasturing on my sweet 



128 Chiefly from 

content. I dream, mayhap with protest, 
of the incentives that are born of an ur- 
ban life; I recall that Fanny Fern said: 
"In town, all things needful may be had 
by reaching out of the up-stairs window." 
But 'tis so vulgar to be dissatisfied with 
one's surroundings. I have all my life 
been trying to emulate doctor Primrose. 
But the sum total of my philosophy, to- 
gether with that of those who have enter- 
ed the arena with me, would scarce make 
up a single day of that worthy's life, — 
day calm and serene, on heights all sunny 
with trust; — far beyond danger from the 
"slings and arrows" of his "outrageous 
fortune ;" — far beyond our mean and fret- 
ful little existence on befogged lowlands. 
. There never was, there never 
will be, — but one doctor Primrose, vicar 
of Wakefield. ,. ,. 

. I have an old volume : The Let- 
ters of Elizabeth Montague, wherein she 
says: — "It is not consistent with the dig- 
nity of our minds, nor that spark of divin- 
ity we call our soul, to be affected by 
every change of situation; — virtue is 



Castles in Spain 129 

guard enough in a crowd, and companion 
enough in a desert." We read this writ- 
er's sparkling wit, her clever originalities, 
all expressed in the purest and most ele- 
gant English, with a patronizing wonder 
how, without the smart and forceful 
words of our latter-day lexicon, she could 
manage to steer so clear of dullness. 

Latterly, in my sometime visits 
to the metropolis, I am reminded of the 
fact that on-coming years, and a provin- 
cial atmosphere, have rendered still more 
sluggish a natural deliberateness of gait 
and tardiness of perception. I am prodded 
in the back by the street-car man, as he 
utters: "Step along lively, lady, please." 
. Now on my native heath, where 
I am saluted by my given name, I get the 
right of way in deference to an obvious 
unfitness for the performance of that iden- 
tical feat in locomotion. . . Edward 
Everett Hales' bit of inspiration: "Look 
out and not in, look up and not down, look 
forward and not backward, and lend a 
hand," finds in me, its living antithesis. — 
I, lend a hand, when I would fain oft- 



130 Chiefly from 

times borrow an extra pair ! And I 

sigh for the lumbering stage-coach, and 

for the city horse-car of my youth.' 

"Not the stage-coach," says Mentor, 
"with the finest lectures of the year an- 
nounced for the dead of winter — a season 
that, you find more and more 'frosty,' 
and less and less 'kindly!' " "But with a 
soapstone," I reply, "and I might even 
resurrect the foot-stove of my grand- 
mother." "Fancy," says Mentor, "you — 
that is, your stage-coach— driving up to 
an unknown country-house for fresh coals 
for the foot-stove, or to have your soap- 
stone re-heated while you wait. You for- 
get that hospitality means several days' 
notice and full credentials." And I sigh 
again, devoutly wishing that sighs were 
fairy-wands. Sighing for The 18-Mile 
House, The io-Mile House, for all those 
departed wayside halts that once dis- 
pensed a comfort rude, but sweet ; where, 
at a groaning board, real hunger, actual 
need, ate without cavil, nay with relish, 
what mere pampered wish might have 

spurned Before Cowper and 

since ever 

"Ease, when courted most, furthest retires, 
An idol at whose shrine, who oftenest sacrifice 
Are favored least." 



TOW SPINNINGS 



COMMERCIALISM AMONG 
STUDENTS 



TOW SPINNINGS 

COMMERCIALISM AMONG 
STUDENTS 



Simultaneously with your- 
self, here is President E. exclaiming 
against the commercialism among stu- 
dents. The Pierian Spring it seems in this 
twentieth century, no longer bears the le- 
gend: "Drink deep, or taste not," but: 
"Drink of the dangerous thing only what 
will suffice to wash down bread and but- 
ter." . . . Shakespeare stayed his 
pen from "The Tempest," from "King 
Lear," from all else that proclaims him 
"vast and universal," and writ large, in a 
mean little phrase, the fact that he is also 
"colorless as light." Only three mun- 
danes in this 190 — , may ignore that well- 
fathered prophetic, bit of advice: "Put 
money in thy purse." Only three: the 



134 Chiefly from 

genius, the hermit, and the philosopher. 
And Diogenes' lantern may have found 
them, but to utilize the modern search- 
light for any such quest, would be but to 
repeat the story of Sodom 

. I am wondering how many of 
us, if left wholly to ourselves, with no low 
whisperings of the fact born in us, and no 
blazoning of it from the very moment of 
our birth, would think the Earth round. . 

. I am thinking that of what we 
call good, of what we call evil, we can see 
only from horizon to horizon. A plane, a 
segment, a culmination, so to speak, of 
that never-ending — -"moving why ye did 

it." 

May the glance of One who 
is without beginning or end, sweep this 
circlet of human passions into a radiant 
diadem that will crown His glory. . 
Such contiguity of good and evil, where 
our human ken can scarce outline the 
boundary, such mysterious, inextricable, 
awful, commingling of light and darkness, 
hate and love, fairness and over-reaching, 
beauty and insightliness, — may He who 
set His bow in the clouds, with its won- 



Castles in Spain 135 

drous, subtle blending of colors, may He 
resolve all Earth's motley into a resplen- 
dent whiteness— an ineffable purity. . 

. "I shall consider it a part of 
my duty in the future, to impress on the 
minds of young people the thought that 
while an education aids in earning a liv- 
ing, it is primarily not for that purpose." 
Do you recognize that very lauda- 
ble sentiment, expressed in that very well- 
rounded period? I am proud of my kins- 
man as I copy it. It may an- 
swer for Mr. Vholes. He cannot, 'tis true, 
be the genius, unless he happened to be 
born in the purple. He might stoically 
exist as the hermit or the philosopher, 
but, "no man liveth unto himself alone," 
—there is that "aged father in the vale of 
Taunton." The aged father is not ubiq- 
uitous, but the peerless, the priceless 
young woman is — very much so. Now if 
loyalty to a parent is a trait worthy of a 
hero, heaven and earth conspire to crown 
as demi-god the noble young man who 
weds and loves supremely, a pure-hearted 
maiden. There was a day when Moore's 
winged little isle might have wafted 



136 Chiefly from 

them off to seas unknown, where they 
could live, love, die alone. But now the 
couple never hear even, of Paradise, or of 
Peris, or of the loves of the angels, as we 
heard years and years ago, out of a beau- 
tiful, beautiful book, all brown and gold, 
now lying tarnished and musty on a long- 
forgotten shelf. And there was another 
volume, in red and gold, with a vignette of 
a vine-branch, all grace, trailing round a 
— well, a goblet. And the leaves of the 
book bore stains of — what! can it be? 
Yes, it is! — "I smell the blood of an 
Irishman." 

. . . . But the W. C. T. U. and 
Mrs. Nation have spirited the "Melodies" 
away. Away, where this once tuneful 
Memnon has become mere dumb parch- 
ment again. 

But this is a digression. As I said, now 
the couple stay in Rome. To them are 
born children. — Strong sons and blooming 
daughters — a family. But one of exalted 
parentage, bearing on its face the stamp 
of its noble stock. — The hermit is no long- 
er possible. A by-word, a laughing-stock, 
an absurdity, a monster, a myth is he. The 
philosopher, however, may still exist. A 



Castles in Spain 137 

composite being made up of this one's 
patience, that one's tact, the other's wit. 
Is there yet hope that the purse may be de 
trop? . . . Alas, alas, alas, "who 
lives in Rome must do as Rome does." 
The fiat, "no man liveth unto himself 
alone," becomes here, trumpet-tongued. . 
On the little isle and to be had 
for the plucking, is that which there feeds 
the soul to repletion with beauty : a hand- 
ful of lilies, sparkling with dew-drops. 
Solomon, appareled as becomes his 
kingly glory, but acts as a foil to one of 
these. An order backed by all the wealth 
of Solomon's coffers would fail in the 
manufacture of so much as a single petal. 
. The purse, filthy lucre, trash, 
we call it, may well there be relegated to 
the proper receptacle of filth — the crema- 
tory In Rome, in Rome, to 

delight the eye, the soul, instead of the 
lily, there is the sheen of satin,— -instead 
of the dew-drops, "the shimmer of pearls." 
And they are not to be had for the pluck- 
ing Earth does not spell 

Utopia, and never will. Were heaped 
multi-millions spread into a plain of uni- 



138 Chiefly from 

versal competence, "vaulting ambition" 
would straightway begin piling up again. 
And yet, this monster which o'er-leaps 
itself, which we all would fain bind fast 
behind prison bars, was mayhap, in its in- 
cipiency, a very child of light : The Love 
of the Beautiful. — To encourage which, to 
foster which — — 



DOWN IN THE WORLD 



FEATHER WEIGHT GOODS 



BY A CREEPER 



DOWN IN THE WORLD 



FEATHER WEIGHT GOODS 



BY A CREEPER 



—"Two by the same author — The Bible 
and The Book of Nature" said Charlotte 
Bronte when questioned as to her favor- 
ite works 

Inspiration — the only lore upon whose 
pages is spelled out for us the word im- 
mortality. 

The Earth. This World is a volume all 
marred with the story of Adam and Eve 
and the Serpent, but the glorious Earth — 
no less than Heaven — is everywhere il- 
luminated with the loving touch of God's 
finger. Much, much of what is here, as 
truly represents Him as what is there. 

Destiny, finding me possessed of a nat- 
ural sluggishness, both mental and physi- 
cal, which years of provincial environ- 



142 Chiefly from 

ment have but emphasized, catered to her 
sense of humor when, she endowed me 
with a passion for French, Dancing, and 
Birds. 

Now French is a touch-and-go lan- 
guage which I always associate with a 
light step, a retrousse nose, end-flying 
ringlets, except in the case of the letter R, 
where the force expended might suffice to 
move Heaven and Earth. Of this letter 
are born the savants. 

When the millennium dawns — and 
Dancing, who now often pirouettes 
through life in vice-besmirched raiment, 
shall again be clothed upon with purity, 
shall again echo with her every foot-fall 
the melody of a Greek lyre, shall again tell 
in her glance her kinship with poesy and 
art, when that time comes — I shall confess 
that one of my most-cherished memory- 
pictures, a scene now dim with age, has 
been that of a group of children, clad as 
my book tells me fairies are, and dancing 
to the sound of merry music at night and 
at an hour when children should be abed ; 
and we of larger growth as well, according 
to modern nature rules. 



Castles in Spain 143 

It was in the salon— brilliantly-lighted, 
and gorgeous to my unsophisticated 
eyes— of a stately ship on the broad bosom 
of the Chesapeake Bay. Grown folks 
there were too. Ladies with hair pow- 
dered and a la Pompadour, and in gowns 
with silken trains, and gentlemen in knee 
breeches and peach-bloom coats, with 
broad, shining shoe-buckles and hair in 
queue, bowed through the stately minuet 
together. I was in my early teens, and 
just from "the country." The only thing 
akin to this sight that I had ever seen was 
"The Drunken Sailor." But until vice 
shall surrender her sword to virtue, until 
the words Calvinism, Mayflower, Puritan, 
Methodism, shall be spelled with orient 
vowels, and pronounced with the deli- 
cious, liquid accent of one of Cable's Cre- 
ole types— that picture shall be turned to 
the wall. 

As to Birds, it was I — I in a previous 
state of existence — who conceived the 
idea of putting salt on their tails in order 
to catch them. This method, I am sorry 
to say, is not always effective. But there 
is an open sesame, thank God, for 



144 Chiefly from 

Nature's wondrous secrets, and, like the 
Blessed Gospel, 'tis free to fool and sage 
alike: Sweet Patience! It enables you 
to identify your bird on some happy, red- 
letter day, by seeing him in the act of 
singing. Thus: March 19, saw some 
sparrow-like birds feeding on cedar ber- 
ries scattered over the snowy ground. 
Head crimson, breast crimson above, 
melting into neutral tint, as if a drop of 
color had trickled down. Soon after, saw 
one on a bush. He was singing — "A twit- 
ter, twitter, wee" — a sweet sound, but not 
noticeable from within doors unless lis- 
tened for. It was the Purple Finch. 

"T'sweet here, T'sweet here," and 
sometimes — very rapidly — "Eury, eury, 
eury :" This was the crested Tit. 

I know not what writer tells me of one 
of the Song Sparrow's several ditties: 
"Maids, maids, maids, come and put the 
kettle on, ettle, ettle, ettle, ettle." But 
friend, I thank thee. The words and 
music fit like hand in glove. Listening to 
it, no matter where, you are not there but 
in the comfortable kitchen of some tree- 
shaded farm-house with Mrs. Poyser call- 



Castles in Spain 145 

ing from the open window to Molly and 
Nancy, without, who come dutifully 
running at her bid. . . In the book, 
the back of the Song Sparrow is striped 
brown and white, and a spot is in the cen- 
ter of his breast. The stripes of the Tree 
Sparrow, it is said, are more clearly de- 
fined than those of the Song Sparrow. 

A born "hewer of wood, and drawer of 
water" labors, comparatively speaking, 
with an apparent freedom from effort that 
is pleasant to the eye of the beholder. The 
magnificent Cardinal, poor fellow, early in 
the season proclaims, with splendor of 
plumage, and mellifluous whistle: "The 
world is a court, and I am king." Later, 
the nest almost on a level with my eye 
and nearly within reach from my open 
window, I see him the jaded paterfamilias, 
his court dress strewing the ground with 
tatters. He is apparently as genuine a 
pessimist as the most embittered human 
among us. His mate, in dress of rich, but 
subdued color, is evidently a plebeian, 
whose stolidity blunts the edge of care. 
All through their honey-moon, each 
morning about four, ere the silence was 



146 Chiefly from 

otherwise broken, there reached my cham- 
ber, just above their home in the Box- 
bush, a brief, rich strain. Then would 
follow a profound hush, and da capo. No 
human master of song ever studied effect, 
by alternating sound and silence, more 
than this God-taught, love-taught crea- 
ture seemed to do. 

The Blue-bird's "tru-al-ly" or "cheer-i- 
ly," though undeniably commendable in 
sentiment, is uttered in a half-hearted 
v/ay that makes no appeal, either to my 
morale, or to my sense of joy. I would 
fain marry this fair creature of celestial 
dyes — the clear azure of the zenith, min- 
gled with the saffron tints of the orient and 
Occident — to a music which I find all the 
more charming, in that it as yet, for me, 
belongs to the unknown, hence the myste- 
rious. It is the embodiment of all the 
dawning sweetness of Spring-time. One 
may simulate the sounds thus: Through 
parted lips, a soft, in-drawn breath, fol- 
lowed by three low, tremulous whistles. 
A prosaic page offers the Redstart as a 
possible claimant: "A smallish bird, 
common, with black wings and tail streak- 



Castles in Spain 147 

ed with orange and vermilion; Song, like 
the small, round tin whistle that is blown 
placed inside of the mouth." 

Set over against each other in the very 
beginning of earth's fair blossom time, 
are the Flicker, one of the wood-pecker 
tribe, and the Junco, or Snow-bird. The 
one in mottled garb of grey, red, yellow, 
and white, moving conspicuously, with 
his incessant, "wicker, wicker, wicker" — 
not metallic, like the "click" of the wood- 
pecker, proper—the other in gown of 
severest hue that I feel sure was made out 
of a remnant, so sparse are the folds. Its 
lisping "tehee, tehee" whispered as if even 
sound must be economized. 

Read the rigmarole that Thoreau puts 
into the throat of the Brown Thrush, and 
you will hear it too. I am always hearing 
the "hurry up," alas, without any Thoreau 
key. His injunction is only preliminary. 
According to this Yankee of the bird- 
world, there is an appalling deal of work 
to be done after you arrive, all out of 
breath. The Brown Thrush is a relative 
of the Robin — of the same size — with a 
tawny back and spotted breast. 



148 Chiefly from 

Had I never read Bird books, wherein, 
without fail, the slender, slate-colored, 
bright-eyed Catbird is made a butt, in- 
stead of suspecting that he profoundly 
admires and imitates the Brown Thrush— 
their song being so nearly identical — -I 
should accuse the raspy-voiced Thrasher 
of himself being the plagiarist. Our Cat- 
bird, for two seasons now, has been enam- 
ored of the word flibbertijibbet. I am 
alternately amused and vexed at his infat- 
uation. He is the ignoble representative 
of one of "his uncles, or his cousins, or his 
aunts," who some ten years since, had a 
nest in the Box-tree, hard by the chamber 
of our poor Shut-in, whose nurse I was. 
We often wondered — she and I — did this 
bird sing in its sleep? Sometimes at mid- 
night, always ere the faintest glimmer of 
summer's hasty dawn, the suffering and 
the watcher had their souls borne as on the 
wings of angels, to a heaven of rapture, 
by a soft, rich strain. Only for one sweet, 
brief moment it was, but the sufferer 
brought back Hope to nestle close beside 
her, and soothe her weary pillow, and the 
nurse Comfort to bathe her weary eye- 
lids. 



Castles in Spain 149 

The birds about us are our own. They 
are not strangers. Year after year, they 
or their blood-relations, return to the 
same community, after hibernating, even 
to the same homestead. Blessed truth! 
The Cat-bird may boast of skill and 
expression, but lacks that "golden thread 
through all his woof of song" — volume. 
The voice of the English Nightingale, at 
times, fills a space of one mile in diameter. 

June 5th. As I was standing by an open 
window this morning a Mocking Wren 
perched on the sill, and remained there for 
some moments, then flew to a maple near 
by and sang my favorite selection in this 
repertoire: "It'll eat you, it'll eat you, 
it'll eat you," loud and clear, the sound 
waves balancing themselves on the air 
like toy balloons. Now, that is what I call 
a delicate attention 

She — the Shut-in— and I the nurse had 
been for years the sole occupants of 
the old, tree-shaded house, and the sick- 
room was on the first floor. Mayhap 
many a belated wayfarer, seeing sole 
glimmer amid the gloom, our midnight 



150 Chiefly from 

taper, had exclaimed : "How far yon little 
candle throws its beams." — —At last the 
night came when she needed but the death 
watch, and I went up-stairs to the rooms 
so long tenantless, with the thought how 
strange it would be to turn down the light 
and go to bed. I left my lamp in an ante- 
room and entered the adjoining chamber 
where the rays of a full moon streamed 
through the uncurtained window. From 
a thing on the broad sill outside — an un- 
defined heap of mingled pallor and gloom 
— stared a pair of eyes — wide-open, unre- 
sponsive, expressionless, stony. 
In a flash, without so much sound as a 
dropping rose-petal, without so much stir 
as an infant's breath, there was— nothing, 
nothing but the ledge, reflecting the pale 
moonbeams. . . . How conceive of 
a disembodied spirit's motion, when Owls 
— all night birds — because their outer- 
edge wing-feathers are curved backward, 
can thus vanish — mingle with the "view- 
less air" apparently, amid unbroken, 
death-like stillness. 

With the Owl, we associate thoughts of 
mystery, gravity, profound research, mel- 



Castles in Spain 151 

ancholy. In its round eggs, ringed eyes, 
the drowsy ball that it becomes in the 
glare of noon-day, we see the circle, the 
thing without beginning or end— no past, 
no future, an eternity of now. 
Fitting accompaniment is this embodied 
pathetic minor to the wail of Thoreau's 
Screech Owl : "Oh, that I had never been 
born !" * 

Stooping to pass through an arch 
formed by the intermingled branches of 
some shrubbery quite near the house, I 
overturned a Dove's nest, with its two 
precious eggs of purest white. The sweet 
confidence thus rudely shaken was never 
restored. Henceforth the bird sought a 
neighbor more considerate. The smooth 
unvarying coo, the decorous, uni-colored 
plumage, bring an image of Propriety 
cradled by kind Fortune— an inner being 

*Note. — The circle idea may be still far- 
ther carried out. The Owl has no profile. 
The eyes are in front, instead of the side 
of its head. Its face is round. The ears 
are in the cheeks. "O" predominates 
in its notes. The Horned Owl says: 
"Hoo-oo, hoo-oo." If H be silent, all is O. 



152 Chiefly from 

of safe mediocrity, incapable alike of ex- 
alted joy or hopeless misery. The child 
Lucy Dean, perched upon a sofa, her head 
as motionless as "a painted ship upon a 
painted ocean," in order to keep her hair 
a-curl. The woman Lucy Dean, with 
only the coo, happily, to express gladness 
or sorrow. In sunshine, the love which 
is only tender, never passionate ; in cloud, 
a pleasing melancholy, in which there is 
no note of despair. A mournfulness well- 
schooled, which comes only when she 
elects to caress it. 

June. — A wood wherein is a spring, 
which, like all of its kind, is born to bless. 
At its source, Earth ventures, even amid 
the rude blasts of winter, to send her 
nurselings of verdure out to play, and the 
truant darlings confidingly follow every 
tinkling foot-fall of the rill on its mission 
of gladness. Other woods with other 
springs are not far off, but this spot 
the Wood Thrushes most favor with 
their songs. At all hours of the day — 
even in the "stilly noon"' — have I heard 
here sweet sounds, as of many flutes 
softly breathing: "Holy, holy, holy." 



Castles in Spain 153 

Owing to the ventriloquism of these 
birds, you must be rarely patient to 
trace them when they are singing. I 
frequently see them silent about the 
ground beneath the trees. Once, as I re- 
clined upon the grass above the spring, 
I chanced to look upward, and there, in 
a young chestnut tree, on the next bough 
but one to the ground, was the singer. 
Smallish, slender, the back tawny, the 
spotted breast, pale, pearly green — like 
the tender willow verdure. Preceding 
each strain was a mellow gurgling — Joy 
seeking utterance — welling, welling into 
an overflow of delicious sound. . 
"She is here, oh !" shrills a bright orange 
and black Oriole, or Fire-bird, from the 
topmost bough of a locust tree. "Sweet, 
I'm glad to meet you— to meet you-u-u, 
oh !" answers a Vireo. By the book, the 
White-eye ! And this unvaried but musi- 
cal game of words is often carried on the 
livelong fair June day. Both build hang- 
ing nests, and both make my neck ache 
and strain my eyes, watching them on 
their lofty perch. The mahogany-colored, 
orchard Oriole, it is said, does not get its 
true colors for four years. 



154 Chiefly from 

The little, warbling Vireo especially af- 
fects villages and towns. Fear— from the 
wilds — says : "Go not ! Here are but the 
claw and the beak. There— over against 
the plow-share and the pruning-hook— 
are the sword and the spear ; and mingled 
with the sweet incense of adoration waft- 
ed heavenward, is the 'rude belching from 
the cannon's mouth.' " But the only an- 
swer is: "Vireo, vir-e-e," a bit of peace 
inspiring, incessant-rolling melody, in the 
very midst of man-made town, keeping 
alive in the human breast the memory of 
that God-given, millennium promise: 
"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb. 
. And a little child shall lead 
them." 

"Which is it, which is it, which is it?" 
rapidly, and like the rattle of tiny shot, 
persistently asks the little Maryland Yel- 
low-throat. And this Paul Pry might find 
an answer, would he but stop long enough 
to hear the frank, "I've cheated ye, I've 
cheated ye" of the tiny black and yellow 
Goldfinch, uttered on the wing. His is not 
the straightforward motion of the incor- 
ruptible. His little body bounds in un- 



Castles in Spain 155 

steady waves. Alternately he is the fugi- 
tive from justice, and the penitent avower 
of his peculation. But I should blot out 
this written fancy with repentant tears, 
for I have heard these Finches— assem- 
bled in groups — singing another song, 
pure and sweet, but unobtrusive. 

Listen for a strain that has been likened 
to the artless prattle of an infant. It is 
rather the inconsequent discourse of a 
fool, but one with method in his madness, 
namely, the court jester — meaningless 
smile, cap, bells, and bauble. Once I saw 
him haranguing astride of the garden pal- 
ings ; once, perched on the roof of a stable. 
. Only the Indigo Bird. It is said 
they do not get their true colors until the 
third season. 

Respect the Chimney Swift — afar off. 
Domicile him not ; still, consider him. He 
makes interesting reading. His kind in 
China and India furnish the edible nests 
which are found in caves, and sell for 
thirty-five dollars per pound. They are 
said to be insipid; still, at that price, I 
think one could manage to extract some 
savor. The bird swallows a glutinous 



156 Chiefly from 

sea-weed and then disgorges it. With this 
it fastens its nest. The nest of our Swift 
—of twigs cut from the tree by the bird 
in its flight — is glued with saliva. The 
Swift is practically ever on the wing, re- 
peating its "tsip, tsip," and can go one 
thousand miles in twenty-four hours. It 
feeds its young during the night, but is 
classed crepuscular, not nocturnal. All of 
exquisite daintiness is expressed in the 
egg — its shell pearly white, translucent, 
revealing the yolk within. 

A bit of dusk, spangled with gold, her- 
alds : "Spring of the year !" This Lark's 
song is the promise of a joy — vague, in- 
tangible — a pallid dawn, with the faintest 
blush of expectancy. Hearing it, I am 
primeval. All lore, of legend or book, is 
forgotten. The horizon is the espousal of 
the earth and the sky, and I go on, on, 
ever hastening to the marriage festival. 
The rain-bow is a colossus, which plants 
its feet on solid ground, and at the key- 
stone is Heaven. A bird I hear — they call 
it the same Lark — all through the sum- 
mer, ofttimes close to my ear as I glean 
among the sheaves, crying then, in clear- 



Castles in Spain 157 

cut tones: "Harvest is here!" — Fulfil- 
ment.— All of delicious mystery naught 
but a memory. 

Adversity cannot "down" the Robin. 
I have seen him in rugged December and 
January. Among the earliest of early 
risers, he has no superior in diligence. 
And oft, when the summer eve — sunless, 
and so, pulseless— sinks, with a last, con- 
vulsive shudder, into the arms of night, 
God is still listening — well pleased — to 
this one bird's vespers. Courage in adver- 
sity, diligence in business, reverence, ado- 
ration—what examples were mortals tak- 
ers of this mute counsel ! But each reck- 
lessly risks to learn life's lesson, for the 
most part, out of his own horn-book. 
And, at last, the thin volume mastered, he 
stands recorded on the great commence- 
ment day, the page all stained with the 
tears of pitying angels: — defaced Deity. 
But there is a Way whereby, instead of 
the sound of angels' weeping, there will 
ring out a pean: "Bring in penitence, 
every day, each ill-wrought thesis to the 
feet of Divine Love, and He will make a 
copy clean and fair." 



158 Chiefly from 

Walking in the lane one evening, on my 
astonished ear there fell some husky 
notes, as of a Robin with a cold(!) 
Thought I : Over against the page where- 
on I have just recorded your virtues, must 
I set it down that you lack prudence? 
Never! The harsh "Come and hear me, 
come and hear me," was from a Scarlet 
Tanager, high up on a locust bough, his 
bright red body, and wings of glossy, 
greenish black, doubly brilliant in the set- 
ting sun's beams. 

I once saw the nest of the Humming- 
Bird. It was on a twig that had been 
severed from a fruit tree. What first im- 
pressed me was its strong build. It was 
about the size of a shell-bark nut divested 
of the epicarp. The humming is made by 
the motion of the bird's wings, but it is 
said to utter a tiny, mouse-like squeak. 
Though this bird is usually in motion 
when observed, I have a number of times 
seen it at rest ; once perched on the cup's 
edge of a white day-lily. Could Fancy 
paint a picture more refined? Only with 
glances — the hands of the soul — dare 
mortals caress such exquisite, corporate 



Castles in Spain 159 

God-thoughts. . . . Often, in rev- 
erie, I am again on the deck of a certain 
dainty steamer. The day is sunny, the 
air but faintly stirring. The ship has a 
motion ■ — slow — almost imperceptible — 
through the waters of a canal. One fan- 
cies that with outstretched arms he may 
touch the banks. Beauty over against 
beauty as far as the eye can reach. A 
wood for the most part, but not not a 
recluse, wrapped in gloom. Heaven's 
blue, all laced with tender green, and 
through the lattice the sun shoots golden 
favors. Dusky tree-boles, not with inci- 
sive outlines barring contiguous space- 
No "I am here, and be thou there;" but 
each with the contour of a snowflake. 
Row after row of veritable pillars of 
cloud set up against the "viewless air." 
For arches, boughs full-draped with tap- 
estry of matchless shading, and, fluttering 
in and out, like brilliant, breeze-stirred 
banners flung against the green, are Red- 
wing Blackbirds, uttering, for legend, 
their victorious "conque-ee." 

Many sweet sounds- — siren-like- — sweep 
with snowy fingers their wondrous harps, 



160 Chiefly from 

and chant in delicious tones a tenderly- 
wooing song. But they are captives, to 
grace the train of an all-pervading still- 
ness that sways our souls like the music 
of an Eolian harp : Anon — -joy itself— we 
roam the flower-decked prairie, gay in 
attire, void of thought as any blossom 
of them all. Anon — on a magnificent out- 
burst of melody, grandly sweeping like 
the rich, full tones of an organ echoing 
through the lofty arches of a cathedral, 
we are upborne to sublimated heights. 
Anon — a last shuddering wail, with flag- 
ging wing, carries us down, down to the 
night, and Doubting Castle, where — Faint 
Heart — we wrestle with Giant Despair. 

On deck, the calm voice of the elect is 
hushed into a sweetness still more spirit- 
ual, and the obtrusive, shrill, self-con- 
scious chatter of the undisciplined is toned 
into something akin to melody. . . "Thy 
speech bewrayeth thee." Whether thou 
usest thy brief bondage of mortality as 
prison bars, against which thou beatest 
with incessant, childish moan; whether, 
in gilded cage, disporting thyself with 



Castles in Spain 161 

many a "flirt and flutter" thou hast for all 
thought. But how thou canst best "take 
thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry" ; 
or whether, an elect spirit, thou art a do- 
cile pupil in Life's great Training-school, 
and so, thy God-given powers take on 

something of the Divine 

Meadow lapses there are, where Earth 
puts off her stateliness, and, decked with 
gaudiest blossoms, flaunts beneath the 
broad sun-stare. . . . And then, a 
"dim, religious light," where Magnolia 
blooms make rich the air of God's cathed- 
ral with balmy incense—incense wafted 
from fairest censers, swung by blameless 
priests. From hidden niches rise songs 
of praise. . . . Here are master- 
tones — Volume, skill, expression, sweet- 
ness! .... I have longed to hear 
the Hermit Thrush, which the book calls 
Beethoven among birds— the Bobolink, 
which, it is said, neither hautboy, flute nor 
dulcimer can match. Failing this, I yield 
to thee, O Mocking Bird, all these praises. 
Thrice, now, have I passed this 
way. Once, on a pitiless, pelting night, 
with voice like the "Banshee's boding 



162 Castles in Spain 

scream," and once, on a day when Earth, 
screened by gloom}/-, envious clouds from 
her shining lord, drenched herself with 
tears — tears, hopeless, unavailing, of 
which was born no radiant Iris, bearing 
sweet promise of assuagement. And yet, 
persistent as the little maid in "We are 
Seven," I'll say: Nay, but both were 
day — and fairest. For in the night, which 
"closed the shutters fast, let fall the cur- 
tain, brought the bubbling and loud-hiss- 
ing urn;" and in the day, when dogging 
Care leaned e'er my shoulder, on the table 
lay two matchless songs of matchless 
singer — and Care fell back. With "The 
icess" on I went, "in the green gleam 
of dewy-tasselPd trees," while, "sweet and 
low" were "all the horns of Elf-land, 
faintly blowing" ; or, with the fair Elaine, 
the "lily maid of Astolat," "Up the great 
river in the boatman's boat, beyond the 
cape that has the poplar on it, far up the 
shining flood until we found the palace 
of the king-." 



■ 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOI 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OFCONGRESS 

lllllillj? 1 

018 602 196 A 



